
LIBRARY OF CQpgRESS 




THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 



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HALF-SAVAGE GIANTS DRESSED IN THE ANCIENT PANOPLY OF THAT CURIOUS 
SLAVIC PEOPLE WHOSE MAIN BUSINESS IS WAR. 



THE WAR IN 
EASTERN EUROPE 



DESCRIBED BY 

JOHN REED 



PICTURED BY 

BOARDMAN ROBINSON 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1916 



Copyright, 1916, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published April, 1916 






■ 




D550 






V v^ 



PREFACE 

WHEN war broke out in August, 1914, I went 
immediately to Europe as correspondent of 
the Metropolitan Magazine, visiting England, France, 
Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Belgium, and see- 
ing fighting with three armies. I returned to New 
York in February, 191 5; and a month later, Board- 
man Robinson and I started for Eastern Europe. 
This book is a record of that second trip. 

It was to be a three-months' flying journey: we 
were going to see Italy enter the war, Venice de- 
stroyed by the Austrians; be in Serbia in time for 
the last stand of the Serbs; watch Rumania plunge 
into the conflict; stand by at the fall of Constanti- 
nople; accompany the Russian steam-roller to Ber- 
lin; and spend a month in the Caucasus reporting 
barbarically colored battles between Cossacks and 
Turks. 

As a matter of fact, we were gone seven months 
and didn't see one of these grand dramatic climaxes. 
Except for getting mixed up with the great Russian 
retreat, and flitting through the Balkans at the begin- 
ning of the German drive, it was our luck everywhere 
to arrive during a comparative lull in the hostilities. 
And for that very reason, perhaps, we were better 



PREFACE 

able to observe the more normal life of the Eastern 
nations, under the steady strain of long-drawn-out 
warfare. In the excitement of sudden invasion, des- 
perate resistance, capture and destruction of cities, 
men seem to lose their distinctive personal or racial 
flavor, and become alike in the mad democracy of 
battle. As we saw them, they had settled down to 
war as a business, had begun to adjust themselves to 
this new way of life and to talk and think of other 
things. 

When we arrived in Italy, the most disappoint- 
ing calm prevailed; but alarming rumors of the im- 
minent capture of Constantinople caused us to drop 
everything and sail for Dedeagatch. At Salonika, 
however, the news from Turkey was so disconcert- 
ingly placid that we left the ship there and made a 
trip into Serbia, then devastated by typhus, and 
slowly recovering from the frightful consequences of 
the last Austrian invasion. 

At the news of Rumanian mobilization we made for 
Bucarest hotfoot — to find much smoke but little fire. 

Constantinople held. So we decided to make a short 
dash into Russia, and return when things grew inter- 
esting at the Dardanelles. The Russian ambassador in 
Bucarest was polite but vague; we must go to Petro- 
grad, he said, and through our ambassadors formally 
request permission to go to the front. However, the ar- 
rival of three disgusted correspondents who had acted 
on this advice and cooled their heels in Petrograd 
for three months, rather discouraged us. The Rus- 



PREFACE 

sian retreat from the Carpathians had begun, and 
there was fighting near Czernowitz on the north, where 
the Russian, Austrian, and Rumanian frontiers meet. 
The American minister in Bucarest kindly gave us a 
list of American citizens to look up as we passed; and 
armed with this slender excuse, we crossed the river 
Pruth in a small boat at night, and landed at the Rus- 
sian front. 

It was unprecedented. The orders were very strict 
that no correspondents should be allowed in these re- 
gions, but the orders specified correspondents coming 
from the north. We came from the south, and so, not 
knowing what to do with us, they sent us north. We 
travelled behind the Russian front through Buco- 
vina, Galicia, and Poland — where we spent two weeks 
in prison. Finally released, we went to Petrograd 
and found ourselves out of the frying-pan but in the 
fire. It seems that by this time the powers that be had 
made up their minds to shoot us. The American em- 
bassy washed its hands of me; but Robinson, a Cana- 
dian by birth, went to the British embassy — and the 
British embassy finally freed us both and got us out 
of Russia. Needless to say, we did not go to the Cau- 
casus. 

Once more in Bucarest, I determined to see Con- 
stantinople, which seemed calmer and safer than ever. 
Robinson could not go because he had a British pass- 
port. Enver Pasha first promised me that I should go 
to the Gallipoli front; but after two weeks' waiting he 
said that no more Americans would be allowed with 

vii 



PREFACE 

the army, because one correspondent had gone back to 
Paris and there published a description of the Turkish 
forts. About this same time I was unofficially notified 
that I had better leave Turkey, because the police had 
seen me talking with too many Armenians. 

At the Bulgarian frontier I was halted and told 
to return to Turkey, as my passport was not properly 
vised. I had no money. The surly Bulgarian chief of 
police wouldn't communicate with the American em- 
bassy nor allow me to do so. So when the train for 
Sofia pulled out, I jumped aboard, riding the rods, 
the blind baggage, and the train top, and escaping 
into the fields when the train was halted and searched 
by soldiers. 

At Bucarest I met Robinson, and together we 
went to Bulgaria, then on the brink of war. When the 
mobilization was declared we fled to Serbia — first, be- 
cause Robinson was a Britisher, and, second, because 
I was informed by the Press Bureau that correspon- 
dents would not be allowed with the army. 

In Serbia, however, we were sure of a warm wel- 
come. But we discovered that the Serbians had all 
read our first two articles about themselves, and did 
not like them. . We were told, in fact, that when hos- 
tilities commenced we would probably be expelled from 
the country. By that time we had had enough of the 
Balkans, so we went anyway. 

Apparently nothing was doing in Salonika. We 
stayed there four or five days, but there were no more 
rumors than usual, and we didn't know whether any- 

viii 



PREFACE 

thing would ever happen or not. So at length we took 
ship for Italy and home. 

Of course we left at exactly the moment when 
the German and Austrian armies invaded Serbia, Bul- 
garia attacked her from the rear, and the English and 
French troops were only six hours' sail from Salonika. 
But we abandoned the warring nations to their respec- 
tive fates and headed for New York, arriving toward 
the last of October. 

As I look back on it all, it seems to me that the 
most important thing to know about the war is how 
the different peoples live; their environment, tradi- 
tion, and the revealing things they do and say. In 
time of peace, many human qualities are covered up 
which come to the surface in a sharp crisis; but on 
the other hand, much of personal and racial quality 
is submerged in time of great public stress. And in 
this book Robinson and I have simply tried to give 
our impressions of human beings as we found them 
in the countries of Eastern Europe, from April to 
October, 191 5. 

J. R. 

New York, March 20, 1916. 



IX 



CONTENTS 

I. SALONIKA 

PAGE 

The Coveted City 3 

The Eastern Gate of War 16 

II. SERBIA 

The Country of Death 29 

The War Capital 42 

Toward the Front 50 

Belgrade Under the Austrian Guns 64 

Along the Battle-Line 75 

A Nation Exterminated 87 

GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES , 94 

III. RUSSIA 

Russia's Back Door 109 

Life at Novo Sielitza 121 

Breaking Into Bucovina 129 

Zalezchik the Terrible . . . 137 

Behind the Russian Retreat 144 

Lemberg Before the Germans Came 160 

xi 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

An Optimistic Pilgrimage 168 

Arrest a la Russe 176 

Prison Life in Cholm 186 

Further Adventures in Captivity 196 

The Face of Russia 206 

The National Industry 218 

A Patriotic Revolution 225 

The Betrayal of the Jews 234 

Petrograd and Moscow 238 

IV. CONSTANTINOPLE 

Toward the City of Emperors 249 

Constantinople Under the Germans 257 

The Heart of Stamboul 270 

An Interview with a Prince 284 

V. THE BURNING BALKANS 

Rumania in Difficulties 295 

Bulgaria Goes to War 309 

Serbia Revisited, and Greece 329 



xn 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

v. The night ride to Shabatz 82 

S The blackened and mutilated church, where three thousand 
men, women, and children were penned up together with- 
out food or water for four days. (Shabatz) 84 

The woman of Goutchevo Mountain 96 

The unburied dead. (Goutchevo) 98 

Hit by a bursting shell 100 

Riding behind Voyvoda Michitch and King Peter 102 

"How is it with thee, O Serbia, my dear mother?" 104 

Crossing the Pruth in a flat-bottomed scow, half full of water no 

Pontoons for the Pruth r . 112 

Turcomans from beyond the Caspian; from the Steppes of 

Asia 114 

Madji indicated her with his hand. "Mon mari!" ["My 

husband!"] he said in his bad French. (Bucovina) . . 116 

A son of Ghenghis Khan. (Turcoman) 118 

Sketches. (Nova-Sielitza) 122 

Gun positions in Bucovina 130 

Peasant carts jolted by with faintly groaning heaps of arms 

and legs. (Bucovina) 132 

Digging trenches near Zastevna 134 

The station at Tarnopol 146 

Refugees . . . waiting stolid and bewildered among their 

bundles 148 

Blind for life. (Kovel) 150 

A soldier on duty gaped for several minutes at our puttees. 

(Tarnopol) 154 

xiv 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Half-savage giants dressed in the ancient panoply of that 

curious Slavic people whose main business is war Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Sketches. (Olympus and Salonika) 4 

Refugee priests. (Salonika) 18 

"The Seven Jolly Carpenters." (Salonika) 20 

Precautions against the typhus. (Nish) 30 

Sketches. (Serbia — Nish) 32 

The sentry 34 

The government sends the soldiers and the oxen all over 

Serbia to help with the ploughing 36 

Discharged from a typhus hospital 44 

Austrian prisoners in uniform wandered freely everywhere 

without a guard 46 

A hospital at Nish 48 

Sketches. (Along the Road) 52 

"A Little Avenger of Kossovo" 54 

Troop-trains moving north through a region of high, rolling 

hills 60 

Looking toward Austria 66 

In the Serb trenches on the Save, two hundred yards from 

the Austrians 70 

Dodging shrapnel on the Save 72 

siii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING FAGS 

Chanting legions. (Lemberg) 164 

Sketches. (On the Way to Lemberg) 166 

Sketches. (Cholm) 172 

Every man looked up and grinned and raised his hand to 

salute 188 

A Kubanski Cossack 190 

Every day or so a tragic little procession would pass up the 

street that led to the prison beyond the monastery . . . 194 

Civil and political prisoners at a station 216 

Every day the Calea Victoriei in Bucarest looks like this . . 300 

A glimpse of the Serbian retreat 320 

The Pirot country — where the Serbians desperately resisted 

the Bulgarian advance on Nish 324 

The Serb ...,.., 332 



I 

SALONIKA 



THE COVETED CITY 

THE English spy counted his change and remon- 
strated with the Italian waiter, who reluctantly 
produced the rest — penny by penny — whining: "Ah, 
signore! I am so poor man ! I serve you well ! You 
take all." 

"It was a week before the declaration of war," 
continued the Englishman, unheeding. "The British 
embassy sent me to discover the whereabouts of two 
Turkish army corps that had gone to Asia Minor. I 
took a boat to Kili on the Black Sea, and travelled 
twelve days by cart. Whenever I got to a village I 
represented myself as a British commercial agent 
looking for new trade routes. I talked to the Turks 
for hours about rice, wheat, roads, and Calcutta gun- 
nies — you have no idea what a bore Calcutta gunnies 
become — and then I went out to find what I could 
find. When I discovered something interesting I 
wired to the British embassy in Constantinople — in 
terms of Calcutta gunnies. I found the army corps; 
they were headed for Armenia and going fast. The 
declaration of. war caught me at Pera. I got out 
travelling overland in a cart — with an American pass- 
port." 

In the silence that followed, the brazen clatter 
of forty Poles dominated everything. They were 

3 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

largely women and children returning from Europe 
by way of Salonika, Nish, Sofia, and Bucarest — the 
only line then open to Warsaw. There were Russians 
on board, too, an Austrian or so, a German with 
Heidelberg schmizzes on his cheek, who talked Italian 
with a broad Teutonic accent and passed for a Neapol- 
itan; a Parisian, mistress and all, a French corre- 
spondent dressed like Rudolph in La Boheme, a Bul- 
garian diplomat who manipulated a tortoise-shell 
lorgnon, and a fringe of nondescript Balkanians whose 
nationality it was impossible to determine. 

The good ship Torino, three days out from Brin- 
disi, was nosing up the Greek coast beyond Piraeus. 
As we sat at coffee we could see through the port the 
tawny promontory of Sunium cleaving the blue ^Egean, 
drenched in white sunlight, the ruined temple on its 
summit delicately yellow against great barren moun- 
tains. Off to starboard misty islands lay like blue 
clouds on the sea, and between them beat wide-flung, 
slanting double sails like the spread wings of gulls — 
white-and-red — on brightly colored ships with proud 
sterns and stems, curving amidships deep to the 
water, with black bull-hides stretched along their 
waists to keep out the spray. 

Where would the war break next? Rumania was 
calling reserves to the colors. Italy trembled on the 
brink. Everybody kept up an incessant and anx- 
ious discussion as to whether Greece and Bulgaria 
would intervene, and on what side. For at any mo- 
ment they might be cut off from home and condemned 

4 




The French correspondent and 

Bulgarian Diplomat. 



OLYMPUS AND SALONIKA. 



THE COVETED CITY 

to perpetual wandering on neutral seas; they might 
be captured on landing and penned into concentra- 
tion camps; they might be taken off the ship as alien 
enemies by a hostile cruiser. It was extraordinary 
how these people, used to comfortable lives in civilized 
and peaceful Europe, adapted themselves without 
astonishment to mediaeval conditions of travel. From 
plague-ridden Salonika they would take a sixty- 
hour railway trip in wooden third-class carriages 
through typhus-ridden Serbia, across the Bulgarian 
border where lawless bands of comitadjis were raiding 
and killing along the railway line; then Sofia, where 
the quarantine authorities penned them like cattle in 
the cars during the six hours of halt, and to that hos- 
tile frontier where the Rumanian and Bulgarian ar- 
mies watched each other jealously across the Danube; 
a day or two days more to Russia, and then the dread- 
ful uncertainty of slow military trains crawling across 
country threatened by the advancing Austrians. 

An Armenian merchant from Constantinople was 
speaking now. He introduced himself as a graduate 
of the American mission school — Roberts College — 
which they say in the East produces more unscrupu- 
lous politicians and financial geniuses than any other 
institution in the world. Waving a cigar clutched in 
stubby fingers covered with jewels, he gave his per- 
sonal views about the Turks, on whose religious prej- 
udices he had battened for years. 

"Yes, I am a Turkish subject," he said, "and 
5 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

my family for generations. They are fine people, the 
Turks — hospitable, kindly, and honest. I have noth- 
ing with which to reproach them, but, of course, I am 
for the Allies. When England holds the Dardanelles — 
ah, then there will be good business! Then there will 
be much money to be made !" 

We passed a sloping headland where squat, red- 
tiled Turkish villages straggled up green hillsides, 
each with its brace of slender, gray minarets. Ahead, 
the muddy waters of the Gulf of Salonika opened 
wide against far views of long hills that crumpled 
into jagged mountains northward — the Balkans ! 

White distant walls, round towers, and a row of 
dazzling buildings edged the bay, and little by little 
a gray and yellow city grew from the barren land- 
scape, climbing a steep hill wide-spread from the sea, 
a city of broad, irregular tiled roofs, round domes, 
spiked with a hundred minarets, encircled by the 
great crenellated wall that was built in the days of 
the Latin Kingdom — Salonika, the Eastern gate of 
war! 

A big French war-ship was moored to the docks. 
Her cranes swung slowly, lowering the cannons from 
her turrets to the shore, where swarms of French 
sailors worked, hammering at the pale flames of forges. 

Our Armenian friend pointed to them with a 

smile. "She is from the Dardanelles," he explained; 

"when I passed, nine days ago, she was here. And 

they call Salonika a neutral port ! " 

Offshore drifted to us the cries of Arabian por- 
6 



THE COVETED CITY 

ters, the shouts of the bazaar, strange minor chants 
of sailors from the coasts of Asia Minor and the Black 
Sea as they hoisted their lateen sails on ships painted 
at the bows with eyes, whose shape was older than 
history; a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer; the 
braying of donkeys; pipes and drums playing squeal- 
ing dance-music from some latticed house far up in 
the Turkish quarter. Swarms of rainbow-colored 
boats manned by swarthy, barefooted pirates jostled 
each other in a roar of shrill squabbling two hundred 
yards away. 

A skiff, carrying a big Greek flag, brought the 
medical officer. He bounded up the ladder shouting: 
"No one ashore who wants to come back. The city 
is quarantined — plague — " And now at our mast- 
head the yellow flag fluttered down, and the gay- 
colored boats broke racing over the sea; in every 
boat half-naked brown men in fezzes and turbans 
stood urging them on with shouts, cursing furiously 
at their rivals. A big dory with the Russian flag 
astern drew under our counter; upright in it stood a 
giant Cossack in a long cloak of deep red, edged with 
fur. A high fur cap, barred on the top with red-and- 
gold, crowned his great head; he had silver baldrics, 
an enormous curved silver sword, and silver-hilted 
pistols in his belt. Another boat bore the Bulgarian 
flag, and the kavas of the Bulgarian consulate in 
deep blue, slung with silver ropes and tassels. We 
stumbled down the gangway, dragging our baggage 
as well as we could, and were seized by twenty rapa- 

7 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

cious hands, torn this way and that, until the strong- 
est boatman filled his craft and shot away with a tri- 
umphant shout. The south wind was rising; as we 
pulled out from the lee of the ship, short yellow-green 
waves broke on our quarter and drenched us. Then 
we were paying exorbitant landing-taxes, and righting 
our way to the street. 

Rubber-tired, luxurious cabs, driven by turbaned 
Arabs, carried the veiled ladies of Turkish harems be- 
tween highly modern street-cars; porters, in the im- 
memorial breech-clout and pack-sack that Sindbad the 
. Sailor wore, trotted by under the weight of typewriters 
and phonographs. ■ So we entered Salonika, where 
Pierre Loti met Aziyade, where East and West do 
finally stand face to face. 

This was the ancient Thessalonika. Here Alex- 
ander launched his fleets. She has been one of the 
free cities of the Roman Empire; a Byzantine metrop- 
olis second only to Constantinople, and the last strong- 
hold of that romantic Latin Kingdom, where the 
broken wreck of the Crusaders clung desperately to 
the Levant they had won and lost. Huns and Slavs 
and Bulgars besieged her; Saracens and Franks 
stormed that crumbling yellow wall, massacred and 
looted in those twisting streets; Greeks, Albanians, 
Romans, Normans, Lombards, Venetians, Phoenicians, 
and Turks succeeded each other as her rulers, and 
St. Paul 'bored her with visits and epistles. Austria 
almost won Salonika in the middle of the Second Bal- 

8 



THE COVETED CITY 

kan War, Serbia and Greece broke the Balkan Alliance 
to keep her, and Bulgaria plunged into a disastrous 
war to gain her. 

Salonika is a city of no nations and of ail nations — 
a hundred cities, each with its separate race, customs, 
and language. Half-way up the steep hill lie the 
tortuous streets and overhanging latticed balconies 
of the Turkish town; northwest is the tumble-down 
quarter of the Bulgarians; the Rumanians live be- 
low, and the Serbs nearer the bay. Grouped around 
the site of the Hippodrome to the east are pure Greeks, 
with Hellenic and Byzantine traditions unbroken for 
fifteen hundred years, and westward dwell the Al- 
banians, that mysterious people who are supposed to 
have fled west from Asia at the break-up of the Hittite 
kingdoms. 

But all the centre of the city is a great com- 
munity of Spanish Jews expelled from Spain by Fer- 
dinand and Isabella. They speak fifteenth-century 
Spanish, written in Hebrew characters, and the lan- 
guage of the synagogue is Spanish, too; but half of 
them turned Mohammedan centuries ago to please the 
Turks, their masters, and now that the Turk is gone 
they live in a maze of mystical sects, practising black 
magic and an ever-changing mixture of all religions. 

The men still wear the flapping slippers, long 
gabardine, and tall felt hat wound with a turban. 
The women are dressed in rich, flowered skirts, fine 
white waists covered by soft silk jackets edged with 
fur, gold beads and earrings, and green silk bonnets 

9 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

to hide their hair, embroidered with pearls, heavy 
with brass ornaments, and crossed with bright-colored 
ribbons that indicate whether they are maidens, wives, 
or widows. Their houses, too, are different. It might 
be a sunny corner of the rich Spanish juderia of Toledo 
five hundred years ago. 

All the tongues of the Western World are spoken 
on the narrow, tumultuous, crowded streets; Spanish 
is the commercial language among the natives; French 
is the international language; the Teutonic drive east- 
ward has made German current; Italian is the polite 
language of the upper classes; Arabic and Turkish 
must be understood, for the servants are Arabs and 
Turks; Greek is universal, and Serbian, Albanian, and 
Bulgarian are common, for Salonika was long the 
port of all the Balkans. 

One night we sat drinking our mastica, a kind of 
Greek absinth, in a local music-hall. First on the 
programme was a Greek chanteuse who sang Ru- 
manian love-songs in Spanish; Russian dancers fol- 
lowed her, and a German monologist from Vienna, 
who spoke French. There was an American tramp 
comedian, who wore a set of seven vests with witty 
remarks on the back as he took each one off — and 
they were printed in Hebrew characters. 

On the Place de la Liberie at sundown little marble- 
topped tables overflow from the cafes to the middle 
of the street, and there, to the music of a Greek mili- 
tary band, drink and promenade the picturesque riff- 

10 



THE COVETED CITY 

raff that history and war has poured into Salonika. 
Besides Greeks, there are French, English, Russian, and 
Serbian officers in full uniform bearing swords, elegant 
young men exiled from Belgrade by war and pesti- 
lence, barbaric kavases from all the consulates — jos- 
tling the bare-legged porters, fishermen out of the "Ara- 
bian Nights," Greek priests, Mussulman hadjis, Jewish 
rabbis with the holy hat and reverend beard, veiled 
women, Turks, and German spies. Northward the 
Street of Liberty leads to the Tcharshee — the roaring 
bazaar, where, in the gloom, cross-legged Turks finger 
old amber and flawed emeralds and stuffs from Bo- 
khara and Samarcand. Down the narrow, roofed-over 
street to the left, ablaze with clashing colors of Oriental 
patterns and crazy windows heaped with dusty piles of 
old gold and cracked turquoises, lies the Street of the 
Silversmiths, where bearded old men squat on high 
benches in their coops, hammering lumps of raw 
silver. Late in the afternoon a shouting tumult fills 
all the bazaar alleys: cries of Arab porters staggering 
under bales and boxes, a servant clearing the way for 
some rich farmer from the country, robed all in white 
linen, with a chain of rough gold beads around his 
neck, and mounted on a mule caparisoned in red 
and blue; lemonade-sellers in fezzes, with carved brass 
ewers on their backs and brass cups clanging at their 
waists, shopkeepers squabbling from sidewalk to side- 
walk, newsboys shouting the latest extra. 

Along the street that was once a part of the great 
Roman road from the Adriatic to the East, beyond 

ii 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the ruins of that marble arch carved with Greek war- 
riors, elephants, camels, and strange peoples beyond 
the Indus, we lost ourselves in a maze of tortuous alleys. 
There we came suddenly upon a little irregular-shaped 
open market, squeezed between huddling shops and 
houses. Under enormous spreading plantain-trees was 
an indescribable tangle of little booths canopied with 
rags, where gold and blue and silver fish lay on 
green leaves, amid baskets of eggs, and piles of green 
and brown vegetables, and masses of red peppers. 
Bundles of chickens hung from tree-trunks, squawking 
feebly, pigs tethered by the legs squealed, and Mace- 
donian farmers in white linen embroidered in colored 
yarns, Jewish women gleaming in silk of pale shades, 
Turks, and gypsies, bargained, quarrelled, stole vege- 
tables when the marketman's back was turned — stag- 
gered from the throng with high-heaped baskets on 
their heads. 

We ordered coffee in a dirty little Greek cafe 
overlooking the market. There was a Greek soldier 
there who stared at us for a long time, then finally 
came over. 

"Where you from?" he asked. "What you 
doing ? " 

We told him. His face lighted up and he reached 
out a hand to both of us. "I been eight years in Amer- 
ica," he said. " My brother has a candy-store in Mason 
City, Iowa; I been everywhere — Kansas, Colorado, 
New York, Illinois — I work in a shoe-shine parlor in 
Springfield, Illinois." 

12 



THE COVETED CITY 

"Are you going back?" we asked. 

"Sure I go back!" he cried, grinning. "I came 
here to fight in the Balkan War, and now I have only- 
three months more to serve in the army — then I am 
free ! I go back to the free country, the fine country, 
my country — America." 

"Have a drink," we said. 

He shook his head: "No, you have a drink with 
me. This is my father's restaurant. Americans al- 
ways treat me good when I go to America, so I like to 
treat Americans. My name is Constantine Chakiris." 

Two other soldiers came up and sat down. 
They carried on an eager conversation with Constan- 
tine, and finally spoke to us, a perfect torrent of ex- 
cited words. 

"These boys not speak English," said Constan- 
tine; "but this man, he has six brothers in America, 
and this man has a sister and his father. They both 
say America the great, strong country — we go to 
America after the war." 

"Do you want Greece to go to war?" we asked. 

"No." He shook his head. "Macedonia don't 
want war; we want peace in Greece." 

"What do you think of Venezelos?" 

He laughed: "Venezelos wants war. If I was 
for Venezelos, I would be killed now. We love Vene- 
zelos; he made us free. But we don't want war. The 
King? Oh, we don't mind him, he is nothing. 

"We in New Greece are very ignorant about 
politics. We have never voted yet, so how can we 

13 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

know about politics? Oh, I love America!" he went 
on ecstatically. "In America I am just like brothers 
with all my friends; here there is no life for a man- 
he can win no money." He paused for a moment. 
"We are Macedonians," he finished; "we are chil- 
dren of Alexander the Great." 

As we went home through the dark street in the 
evening, two other Greek soldiers passed us. As 
they got behind us, one of them turned round. "I 
bet those two guys are Americans," he said. 

"Hello, Bill !" we shouted. 

"Hello!" They came back. "I know you are 
Americans. I live seven years in the States — two 
years more I got to serve in the army, then I go back." 

"Do you fellows want Greece to go to war?" we 
asked. 

"Sure we want Greece to go to war! We con- 
quer Constantinople. Our King — he is named Con- 
stantine, and once Constantinople was Greek! You 
remember? We will go back to Constantinople with 
Constantine. Fight! Sure we like to fight — fight 
Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy — all!" 

"Where are you from?" 

"We are from Sparta !" 

As we strolled up and down the city day after 
day, scores of people shouted to us in broad Amer- 
ican — soldiers, shopkeepers, and even newsboys. Be- 
low the hotel was a plush-upholstered shoe-shining 
parlor presided over by a Greek with fierce mustache. 

"Hello, boys!" he said; "glad to see you. This 
14 



THE COVETED CITY 

place is a branch of George's place on Forty-Second 
Street, New York. George, he is my brother." And 
he refused to allow us to pay for our shine. 

The shops were full of American shoes with knobs 
on the toes, American college clothes with humps of 
padding on the shoulders and buttons in unexpected 
places, American dollar watches, and American safety- 
razors. 

Apparently the entire masculine Greek popula- 
tion of Salonika had been to America. "America, the 
free country where you get rich ! Yes, we are Greeks. 
We are proud to be Greeks," with a shrug; "but a 
man cannot live in Greece." And they are all going 
back when the war is over, and their military service 
done. 

In Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania we met others 
who had been to America and caught the fever. That 
fierce irrational feeling called patriotism was strong 
in them — they loved their country and would die for 
it — but they could not live in it. They had tasted 
blood; they had experienced a civilization where the 
future of a new world is still an untried adventure. 



15 



THE EASTERN GATE OF WAR 

BY here passed the American Red Cross units, the 
foreign Medical Missions, on their way to typhus- 
stricken Serbia — veteran doctors and big, robust nurses 
laughing at the danger and boasting what they would 
do; and by here the gaunt, shaking survivors drifted 
back to tell how their comrades died. 

Still they came. While we were in Salonika three 
new British expeditions passed through, one hun- 
dred and nineteen strong. Fresh young girls, un- 
trained and unequipped, without the slightest idea 
what they must face, explored the colorful streets and 
the bazaars. 

"No, I never had any experience in nursing," 
said one; "but one just nurses, doesn't one?" 

A British Royal Army Medical Corps lieutenant 
who heard her shook his head in despair. 

"The damned fools in England to let them 
come!" he cried. "It is almost certain death. And 
they are worse than useless, you know. They are 
the first to fall sick, and then we have to look after 
them." 

Of course, there was a new rumor every five 
minutes. Day and night ephemeral newspapers 

16 



THE EASTERN GATE OF WAR 

flooded the streets and cafes with huge scareheads 
reading : 

"CONSTANTINOPLE FALLS!" 

"FORTY THOUSAND ENGLISH SLAUGHTERED 
ON THE PENINSULA!" 

"TURKISH REVOLUTIONISTS MASSACRE THE 
GERMANS!" 

One evening an excited mob of soldiers with flags 
swept cheering along the sea-wall shouting: "Greece 
declares war!" 

Spies infested the city. Germans with shaved 
heads and sword-cuts all over their faces pretending 
to be Italians; Austrians in green Tyrolean hats 
passing as Turks; stupid-mannered Englishmen who 
sat drinking and talking in the cafes, eavesdropping 
the conversation in six languages that went on about 
them; exiled Mohammedans of the Old Turk party 
plotting in corners, and Greek secret-service men who 
changed their clothes fourteen times a day and al- 
tered the shape of their mustaches. 

Occasionally out of the East a French or British 
war-ship grew slowly from the flat world of the sea, 
moored at the docks, and made repairs. Then the 
city was full of drunken sailors day and night. 

For Salonika was anything but neutral. Besides 
the army officers on the streets, every day saw the 
arrival of British ships full of ammunition for the 
Serbian front. Every day cars loaded with English, 
French, and Russian cannon disappeared into the 
sombre mountains northward. We saw the English 

17 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

gunboat on its special car begin the long journey to 
the Danube. And through this port went the French 
aeroplanes, with their hundred pilots and mecaniciens; 
and the British and Russian marines. 

And all day long the refugees poured in; political 
exiles from Constantinople and Smyrna, Europeans 
from Turkey, Turks who feared the grand smash-up 
when the empire should fall, Greeks of the Levant. 
From Lemnos and Tenedos the refugee-boats carried 
the plague brought there by the Indian troops — even 
now it was spreading in the crowded lower quarters 
of the town. Always you could see pitiful processions 
crawling through the streets — men, women, and chil- 
dren with bloody feet limping beside broken-down 
wagons filled with the dilapidated furniture of some 
wretched peasant's hut. Hundreds of Greek popes 
from the monasteries of Asia Minor shuffled by, their 
threadbare black robes and high hats yellow with 
dust, their feet bound with rags, and all their posses- 
sions in a gunny sack over their shoulders. In tram- 
pled courtyards of old mosques, under pillared por- 
ticos painted red and blue, half-veiled women with 
black shawls on their heads crowded, staring vacantly 
into space or weeping quietly for their men, who had 
been taken for the army; the children played among 
the weed-grown tombs of the hadjis; their scanty 
bundles of belongings lay heaped in the corners. 

Late one night we walked through the deserted 
quarter of docks and warehouses, so filled with shout- 

18 



THE EASTERN GATE OF WAR 

ing movement by day. From a faintly lighted window 
came the sound of pounding and singing, and we 
peered through the grimy pane. It was a water-front 
saloon, a low- vaulted room with a floor of hard-packed 
earth, rough table and stools, piles of black bottles, 
barrel-ends and one smoking lamp hung crazily from 
the ceiling. At the table sat eight men, whining a 
wavering Oriental song, and beating time with their 
glasses. Suddenly one caught sight of our faces at 
the window; they halted, leaped to their feet. The 
door flew open — hands reached out and pulled us in. 

"Entrez! Pasen Ustedes I Herein! Herein!" 
shouted the company, crowding eagerly about as we 
entered the room. A short, bald-headed man with a 
wart on his nose pumped our hands up and down, 
babbling in a mixture of languages: "To drink I To 
drink ! What will you have, friends?" 

"But we invite you — " I began. 

"This is my shop! Never shall a stranger pay 
in my shop! Wine? Beer? Mastica?" 

"Who are you?" asked the others. "French? 
English? Ah — Americans! I have a cousin — his name 
Georgopoulos — he live in California. You know him ? " 

One spoke English, another harsh maritime 
French, a third Neapolitan, a fourth Levantine Span- 
ish, and still another pidgin-German; all knew Greek, 
and the strange patois of the Mediterranean sailor. 
The fortunes of war had swept them from the four 
corners of the Middle World into this obscure back- 
water on the Salonika docks. 

19 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"It is strange," said the man who spoke English. 
"We met here by chance — not one of us has ever 
known the other before. And we are all seven car- 
penters. I am a Greek from Kili on the Black Sea, 
and he is a Greek, and he, and he — from Ephesus, and 
Erzeroum, and Scutari. This man is an Italian — he 
lives in Aleppo, in Syria — and this one a Frenchman 
of Smyrna. Last night we were sitting here just 
like now, and he looked in at the window like you 
did." 

The seventh carpenter, who had not spoken, said 
something that sounded like a German dialect. The 
proprietor translated: 

"This man is Armenian. He says all his family 
is killed by the Turks. He tries to tell you in the Ger- 
man he learned working on the Bagdad Railway !" 

"Back there," cried the Frenchman, "I leave 
my wife and two kids! I go away hiding on a fisher- 
boat " 

"God knows where is my brother." The Italian 
shook his head. "The soldiers took him. We could 
not both escape." 

Now the master of the house brought liquor, and 
we raised our glasses to his beaming countenance. 

"He is like that," the Italian explained with ges- 
tures. "We have no money. He gives us food and 
drink, and we sleep here on the floor, poor refugees. 
God will certainly reward his charity ! " 

"Yes. Yes. God will reward him," assented 
the others, drinking. The proprietor crossed himself 

20 



THE EASTERN GATE OF WAR 

elaborately, after the complicated fashion of the 
Orthodox Church. 

"God knows I am fond of company," he said. 
"And one cannot turn away destitute men in times 
like these, especially men of pleasing talents. Be- 
sides, a carpenter gains good wages when he works, 
and then I shall be repaid." 

"Do you want Greece to go to war?" we asked. 

"No!" cried some; others moodily shook their 
heads. 

"It is like this," the English-speaking Greek said 
slowly: "This war has driven us from our homes and 
our work. Now there is no work for a carpenter. 
War is a tearing down and not a building up. A car- 
penter is for building up — " He translated to the 
silent audience, and they growled applause. 

"But how about Constantinople?" 

"Constantinople for Greece! Greek Constan- 
tinople!" shouted two of the carpenters. But the 
others broke into violent argument. 

The Italian rose and lifted his glass. "Eviva Con- 
stantinople Internazionale ! " he cried. With a cheer 
everybody rose "Constantinople Internazionale!" 

"Come," said the proprietor, "a song for the 
strangers!" 

"What was that you were singing when we 
came?" demanded Robinson. 

"That was an Arab song. Now let us sing a real 
Turkish song ! " And throwing back their heads, the 
company opened their noses in a whining wail, tap- 

21 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

ping with stiff fingers on the table while the glasses 
leaped and jingled. 

"More to drink!" cried the excited innkeeper. 
"What is song without drink?" 

"God will reward him!" murmured the seven 
carpenters in voices husky with emotion. 

The Italian had a powerful tenor voice; he sang 
"La donna e mobile" in which the others joined with 
Oriental improvisations. An American song was 
called for, and Robinson and I obliged with "John 
Brown's Body" — which was encored four times. 

Later dancing displaced music. In the flickering 
light of the fast-expiring lamp the proprietor led a 
stamping trio in the kolo, racial dance of all the Balkan 
peoples. Great boots clumped stiffly down, arms 
waved, fingers snapped, ragged clothes fluttered in 
brown shadow and yellow radiance. . . . Followed 
an Arab measure, all swaying bodies and syncopated 
gliding steps, and slow twirlings with closed eyes. At 
an early hour of the morning we were giving the 
company lessons in the "boston," and the turkey 
trot. . . . And so ended the adventure of the Seven 
Carpenters of Salonika. 

Toward evening we would wander through the 
shouting Tcharshee, past the Prefecture — where the 
sentries wore white ballet-skirts and turned-up slippers 
ornamented with green pompoms — and climb the steep, 
crooked streets of the Turkish town. Past the little 
pink mosque on the corner, with its tall cypress and 

22 



THE EASTERN GATE OF WAR 

gray minaret; through streets overhung with shah- 
nichars, behind which mysterious women tittered and 
rustled — no doubt all mysteriously beautiful. There 
were glimpses into the interior of hans, long trains of 
laden donkeys entering and leaving, pack-saddles 
piled in corners, Turks and peasants sitting cross- 
legged in the shade over their coffee. Sharp, black 
shadows fell across the cobbled courtyard, and 
women passed brightly into sunlight carrying painted 
earthen water-jars on their shoulders. Beyond was 
the Turkish market, with its leisurely, quiet crowd. 
Along the sides of a street thronged with booths of 
meat-sellers, the baskets of the fish-merchants, heaps 
of vegetables, and droves of chickens, were the cafes 
where the traders sat smoking their chibouks. Here 
one saw hadjis, holy men in green turbans who had 
made the pilgrimage to Mecca, dancing dervishes in 
tall gray hats and long, flaring robes of ash-color, the 
dull reds and sheepskins and cream-colored linens of 
farmers from the villages, and beardless eunuchs fol- 
lowing veiled ladies of the seraglio. 

Still farther on the cobbled street rose sharply 
into tranquillity. Here the latticed windows whis- 
pered, and only the occasional donkey of a street 
vender passed — rarely women with hidden faces going 
to the fountain with jugs on their hips. Unexpectedly, 
the climbing way broadened out in an irregular little 
open place, shaded by an immense and ancient tree, 
where two or three tiny cafes sheltered each its medi- 
tative, smoking Turks, and others squatted along 

23 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the curb, speaking slowly with soft voices. They 
looked at us incuriously, indifferently, and turned 
away again to their own affairs. 

Still upward, until the great yellow wall loomed 
overhead, all its deep crenellations sharp outlined 
against the warm afternoon blue. We passed through 
a breech where the inhabitants had for centuries 
taken the stone for their houses, and looked out upon 
the summits of green hills, far-lying meadows where 
sheep pastured. At the edge of the world northward 
loomed the purple mountains, behind which war and 
pestilence raged. Nearer at hand, slanting black 
gypsy tents were scattered, and in a far green pocket 
of earth leaping barelegged men in red trousers and 
yellow turbans played ball. Tinkling mule-trains, 
with linen-clad peasants strolling behind, moved 
along faint tracks to unseen villages somewhere over 
the rim of the horizon. 

From a little hut built against the base of the 
great wall came an old Turk. He bowed to us, and 
returning, brought two wooden chairs. We saw him 
no more until we rose to go away, when he reappeared, 
bowed to us, and took the chairs. I tried to give him 
some money; he only shook his head, smiling, and 
said something we didn't understand. . . . 

Now the sun low in the west flooded the green, 
cloudless sky with waves of yellow light. We went 
along a beaten path that wound between miserable 
houses built of flints, and came to an open space where 

the magnificent panorama of the tumbled city fell 

24 



THE EASTERN GATE OF WAR 

away to the sea. Dull-red plains of roofs, jutting bal- 
conies, round white domes, spires, bulbous Greek tow- 
ers, minarets spiring delicately beside lofty cypresses; 
the squealing roar of an Oriental town mounting 
from hidden streets. At the water's edge stood the 
round white tower of the Venetian wall, and beyond 
spread a sea the color of cloudy Chinese jade, spotted 
with slanting sails, yellow, white, and red. Southward, 
barring the gulf, the rugged Greek mainland towered 
into the mighty range of Mount Olympus, covered 
with snow and ever veiled with a cloud. To the right, 
the golden city-wall plunged magnificently down in- 
to the valley, and up the slope of the hill, dwindling 
westward for miles. The silver Vardar wound flatly 
through its willowy plain; farther yet were the swamps 
where Bulgarian comitadjis, fighting to make Mace- 
donia free, once held at bay a Turkish army corps; 
and at the far end of vision, the sharp Thessalian 
mountains. 

Dusk fell swiftly. For a moment the high white 
crest of Olympus glowed an unearthly pink, slowly 
fading. In the deep sky there were suddenly millions 
of stars; a crescent moon brightened half-way up the 
night. Below us, the muezzins came out on the para- 
pets of seventeen minarets with tiny yellow lanterns, 
and pulled them jiggling up the halyards. From 
where we stood we could hear their high dissonant 
voices shouting the shrill call of the faithful to prayer: 

"God is great! God is great! God is great! 
God is great! I bear witness that there is no other 

25 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

god but God ! I bear witness that there is no other 
god but God ! I bear witness that Mohammed is the 
apostle of God! I bear witness that Mohammed is 
the apostle of God ! Come to prayer, come to prayer ! 
Come to salvation, come to salvation! Prayer is 
better than sleep. . . ." 

Now the Turkish town shrinks, and the quiet 
flow of Turkish life weakens, year by year, before the 
mounting flood of busy, inquisitive Greeks. Mosque 
after mosque falls to ruin, and every month sees voice- 
less and deserted some minaret where the muezzin 
called to prayer each sunset for centuries. Mecca has 
become distant and powerless, and whatever the result 
of the war, Stamboul will never again rule Salonika; 
the Turks of Salonika are dying out. And the city it- 
self is dying — in the loss of her hinterland, in the fevers 
that sweep her periodically from the low-lying Vardar, 
the silt that slowly chokes her magnificent harbor, the 
voracious channel of the river that already eats into 
the town. Soon Salonika will no longer be worth a 
war. 



26 



II 

SERBIA 



THE COUNTRY OF DEATH 

WE rubbed ourselves from head to foot with cam- 
phorated oil, put kerosene on our hair, filled 
our pockets with moth-balls, and sprinkled naphthaline 
through our baggage; and boarded a train so satu- 
rated with formalin that our eyes and lungs burned as 
with quicklime. The Americans from the Standard 
Oil office in Salonika strolled down to bid us a last 
farewell. 

"Too bad," said Wiley. "So young, too. Do 
you want the remains shipped home, or shall we have 
you buried up there?" 

These were the ordinary precautions of travellers 
bound for Serbia, the country of the typhus — ab- 
dominal typhus, recurrent fever, and the mysterious 
and violent spotted fever, which kills fifty per cent 
of its victims, and whose bacillus no man had then 
discovered. Most doctors thought it was carried by 
clothing lice, but the British R. A. M. C. lieutenant 
who travelled with us was sceptical. 

"I've been up there three months," he said, "and 
I've long ago stopped taking any precautionary mea- 
sures whatever except a daily bath. As for the lice — 
one gets used to spending a quiet evening picking 
them off one." He snorted at the naphthaline. 
"They're really quite fond of it, you know. The 

29 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

truth about the typhus is that no one knows any- 
thing about it at all, except that about one-sixth of the 
Serbian nation is dead of it. . . ." 

Already the warm weather and the cessation of 
the spring rains had begun to check the epidemic — 
and the virus was weaker. Now there were only a 
hundred thousand sick in all Serbia, and only a thou- 
sand deaths a day — besides cases of the dreadful post- 
typhus gangrene. In February it must have been 
ghastly — hundreds dying and delirious in the mud of 
the streets for want of hospitals. 

The foreign medical missions had suffered heav- 
ily. Half a hundred priests succumbed after giving 
absolution to the dying. Out of the four hundred 
odd doctors with which the Serbian army began the 
war, less than two hundred were left. And the typhus 
was not all. Smallpox, scarlet fever, scarlatina, diph- 
theria raged along the great roads and in far villages, 
and already there were cases of cholera, which was 
sure to spread with the coming of the summer in that 
devastated land; where battle-fields, villages, and roads 
stank with the lightly buried dead, and the streams 
were polluted with the bodies of men and horses. 

Our lieutenant belonged to the British Army 
Medical Mission, sent to fight the cholera. He was 
dressed in full service uniform, and carried a huge 
sword which got between his legs and embarrassed 
him frightfully. 

"I don't know what to do with the bally thing," 
he cried, hurling it into a corner. "We don't wear 

30 



THE COUNTRY OF DEATH 

swords in the army any more. But we have to out 
here, because the Serbians won't believe you're an 
officer unless you carry a sword. . . ." 

As we crawled slowly up between barren hills 
along the yellow torrent of the Vardar, he told us how 
the English had persuaded the Serbian Government 
to stop all train service for a month, in order to pre- 
vent the spread of disease; then they ordered sanitary 
improvements in the filthy towns, compelled anti- 
cholera vaccination, and began to disinfect whole 
sections of the population. The Serbians sneered — 
these English were evidently cowards. When Colonel 
Hunter, unable to secure decent quarters, threatened 
the authorities that if one of his men died of typhus 
he would abandon Serbia, a storm of irony burst. 
Colonel Hunter was a coward! And the Americans 
were cowards, too, when, with half their units in- 
fected, they abandoned Gievgieli. To the Serbians, 
the taking of preventive measures was a proof of ti- 
midity. They regarded the immense ravages of the 
epidemic with a sort of gloomy pride — as mediaeval 
Europe regarded the Black Death. 

The gorge of the Vardar, as if it were a sterile 
frontier between Greek Macedonia and the high 
valleys of New Serbia, broadened out into a wide 
valley rimmed with stony hills, beyond which lay 
mountains still higher, with an occasional glimpse of 
an abrupt snow peak. From every canyon burst 
rapid mountain streams. In this valley the air was 

31 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

hot and moist; irrigation ditches, lined with great 
willows, struck off from the river, across fields of 
young tobacco-plants, acres upon acres of mulberry- 
trees, and ploughed land of heavy, rich clay that looked 
like cotton country. Here every field, every shelf of 
earth, was cultivated. Higher up, on bare slopes 
among the rocks, sheep and goats pastured, tended 
by bearded peasants with huge crooks, clad in sheep- 
skin coats, spinning wool and silk on wooden distaffs. 
Irregular, white, red-roofed villages meandered along 
rutted spaces where squat little oxen and black water- 
buffaloes dragged creaking carts. Here and there was 
the galleried konak of some wealthy Turk of the old 
regime, set in yellow-green towering willows, or flower- 
ing almond- trees heavy with scent; and over the 
tumbled little town a slender gray minaret, or the 
dome of a Greek church. 

All sorts of people hung about the stations — men 
turbaned and fezzed and capped with conical hats of 
brown fur, men in Turkish trousers, or in long shirts 
and tights of creamy homespun linen, their leather 
vests richly worked in colored wheels and flowers, or 
in suits of heavy brown wool ornamented with patterns 
of black braid, high red sashes wound round and 
round their waists, leather sandals sewed to a circular 
spout on the toe and bound to the calf with leather 
ribbons wound to the knees; women with the Turk- 
ish yashmak and bloomers, or in leather and woollen 
jackets embroidered in bright colors, waists of the raw 
silk they weave in the villages, embroidered linen un- 

32 v 




S./S.. A.h 



Graves along the Vardar. 




A n old soldier. 





Peasant. 



Soldier. 



SERBIA— NISH. 



THE COUNTRY OF DEATH 

derskirts, black aprons worked in flowers, heavy over- 
skirts woven in vivid bars of color and caught up be- 
hind, and yellow or white silk kerchiefs on their heads. 
Many wore a black kerchief — the only sign of mourn- 
ing. And always and everywhere gypsies — the men 
in a kind of bright turban, the women with gold pieces 
for earrings and patches and scraps of gay rags for 
dresses, barefooted — shuffling along the roads beside 
their caravans, or lounging about the rakish black tents 
of their camps. 

A tall, bearded man in black introduced himself 
in French as a Serbian secret-service officer whose 
job was to keep us under observation. Once a dapper 
young officer came aboard and questioned him, nod- 
ding to us. The other responded. 

"Dobral Good!" he said, clicking his heels and 
saluting. 

"That station," remarked the secret-service man 
as the train moved on again, "is the frontier. We 
are now in Serbia." 

We caught a glimpse of several big, gaunt men 
lounging on the platform, rifles with fixed bayonets 
slung at their shoulders, without any uniform except 
the soldier's kepi. 

"What would you?" shrugged our friend, smil- 
ing. "We Serbians have no longer any uniforms. 
We have fought four wars in three years — the First 
and Second Balkan Wars, the Albanian revolt, and 
now this one. . . . For three years our soldiers have 
not changed their clothes." 

33 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Now we were passing along a narrow field planted 
with small wooden crosses, that might have been 
vine poles, spaced about three feet apart; they marched 
beside the train for five minutes. 

"The typhus cemetery of Gievgieli," he said 
laconically. There must have been thousands of those 
little crosses, and each marked a grave ! 

There came in sight a great, tramped-down space 
on a hillside beyond, honeycombed with burrows 
leading into the brown earth, and humped into round 
hutches of heaped-up mud. Men crawled in and out 
of the holes, ragged, dirty fellows in every variety of 
half-uniform, with rifle-belts crisscrossed over their 
breasts like Mexican revolutionists. Between were 
stacked rifles, and there were cannon with ox-yoke 
limbers and hah a hundred springless ox-carts ranged 
along the side, while farther on the hobbled oxen 
grazed. Below the mud huts, at the bottom of the 
hill, men were drinking from the yellow river that 
poured down from a score of infected villages up 
the valley. Around a fire squatted twenty or 
more, watching the carcass of a sheep turn in the 
flames. 

"This regiment has come to guard the frontier," 
explained our friend. "It was here that the Bulgarian 
comitadjis tried to break through and cut the rail- 
road last week. At any moment they might come 
again. ... Is the Bulgarian Government respon- 
sible, or did the Austrians pay them? One can never 
tell, in the Balkans." 

34 




THE SENTRY. 
Hollow-cheeked, filthy, and starved-looking. 



THE COUNTRY OF DEATH 

And now, every quarter mile we passed a rude 
hut made of mud and twigs, before which stood a 
ragged, hollow-cheeked soldier, filthy and starved- 
looking, but with his rifle at present arms. All over 
Serbia one saw these men — the last desperate gleaning 
of the country's manhood — who live in the mud, with 
scanty food and miserable clothing, guarding the 
long-deserted railroad tracks. 

At first there seemed no difference between this 
country and Greek Macedonia. The same villages, 
a little more unkempt — tiles gone from the roofs, 
white paint chipped from the walls; the same people, 
but fewer of them, and those mostly women, old men, 
and children. But soon things began to strike one. 
The mulberry-trees were neglected, the tobacco-plants 
were last year's, rotting yellow; corn-stalks stood 
spikily in weedy fields unturned for twelve months 
or more. In Greek Macedonia, every foot of arable 
land was worked; here only one field out of ten showed 
signs of cultivation. Occasionally we saw two oxen, 
led by a woman in bright yellow head-dress and bril- 
liantly colored skirt, dragging a wooden plough carved 
from a twisted oak limb, which a soldier guided, his 
rifle slung from his shoulder. 

The secret-service man pointed to them. "All 
the men of Serbia are in the army — or dead — and all 
the oxen were taken by the government to draw the 
cannon and the trains. But since December, when 
we drove the Austrians out, there has been no fight- 
ing. So the government sends the soldiers and the 

35 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

oxen over Serbia, wherever they are wanted, to help 
with the ploughing." 

Sometimes, in details like these, there flashed be- 
fore our imaginations a picture of this country of the 
dead: with two bloody wars that swept away the 
flower of its youth, a two months' hard guerilla cam- 
paign, then this fearful struggle with the greatest 
military power on earth, and a devastating plague on 
top of that. Yet from the ruins of a whole people, 
imperial ambitions were already springing, which might 
one day threaten all southern Europe. 

Gievgieli shares with Valievo the distinction of 
being the worst plague-spot in Serbia. Trees, station, 
and buildings were splashed and spattered with chlo- 
ride of lime, and armed sentries stood guard at the 
fence, where a hundred ragged people pressed mur- 
muring — for Gievgieli was quarantined. We stared 
through the fence at a wide, rough street of cobbles 
and mud, flanked by one-story buildings white with 
disinfectant; at almost every door flapped a black 
flag, the sign of death in the house. 

A stout, mustached man in a dirty collar, spotted 
clothing, and a smutty Panama pulled down over his 
eyes stood on the platform, surrounded by a dense 
circle of soldiers. He held a small wild flower on 
high, and addressed the secret-service man volubly 
and excitedly. 

"See!" he cried. "This flower I found in that 
field beyond the river. It is very curious ! I do not 
know this flower ! It is evidently of the family of the 

36 



THE COUNTRY OF DEATH 

orchida!" He scowled and fixed the secret-service 
man with a menacing eye. "Is it not of the family of 
the orchida?" 

"It has certain characteristics, indeed," said 
the other timidly. "This tongue. . . . But the 
pistil " 

The fat man shook the flower. "Nonsense! It 
is of the family of the orchidce!" 

The soldiers round about broke into a hum of 
argument : " Da I Orchida ! " "Ne je orchida ! " " But 
it is evidently an orchid!" "What do you know 
of orchids, George Georgevitch? At Ralya, where 
you come from, they haven't even grass ! " There 
was a laugh at this. Above it rose the fat man's voice, 
insistent, passionate: "I tell you it is an orchid! It 
is a new kind of orchid ! It is unknown to the science 
of botany " 

Robinson caught the infection of the argument. 
"Orchid?" he said to me with a sneer. "Of course 
it's not an orchid!" 

"It is an orchid!" I returned hotly. "It is 
formed very like the lady's-slippers that we see in 
American woods " 

The fat man wheeled around and erupted into 
broken English, glaring at us. "Yes, yes!" he said 
eagerly. "The same. Are you Americans? I have 
been in America. I have tramped through Kansas 
and Missouri, working on the farms of wheat. I have 
walked through the Panhan'le of Texas, with work 
at the cattle-ranch. I am on foot gone through Seattle 

37 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

to San Francisco, to Sacramento, crossing the Sierras 
and the desert to Yuma in Arizona — you know Yuma ? 
No? I am studying all kind of farming from first- 
hand for to apply these experiences to Serbian farms. 
My name is Lazar Obichan. I am an Agro-Geolog, 
and secretary in Department of Agriculture in govern- 
ment at Belgrade. Yes." He cleared his throat, 
waved his elbows to make a space in the crowd, and 
seized us each by a lapel. 

"I am sent here to study soil, climate, and crop 
conditions of New Serbia. I am an expert. I have 
invented a new method to tell what can be grown in 
any soil, in any country. It is automatic, simple, 
can be appli' by anybody — a new science. Listen! 
You give me the humidity — I put her there" He 
poked Robinson stiffly in the shoulder-blade. "Then 
you give me the mean temperatoor — I put him there." 
A jab near Robinson's kidney. " From humidity I draw 
a vertical line straight down, isn't it? From mean 
temperatoor I draw horizontal line straight across." 
He suited the action to the word, furrowing the artist's 
diaphragm. His voice rose. "Until the two lines 
meet! And the point where they meet, there is the 
figure which gives the evaporation for one day!" 
He poked us simultaneously in the chest to empha- 
size each word, and repeated: "The Evaporation for 
One Day!" He threw both hands up and beamed 
upon us, pausing to allow this to sink in. We were 
impressed. 

"But that is not all I have in my mind," he went 
38 



THE COUNTRY OF DEATH 

on heavily. "There is a vast commercial and finan- 
cial scheme — immense! Listen! After this war Ser- 
bia she will need much money, much foreign capitals. 
From where will he come? From England? No. 
England will need all at home. France and Russia 
will be absolute exhausticated. No capitals from Eu- 
rope. Where then? I tell you. From America. 
America is rich. I have been in her and I know how 
rich. Listen! We will establish a Serbian- American 
Bank with American capitals and American managers. 
It will sit in Belgrade. It will lend money to Serbians 
— big profit! Serbian law allows to charge twelve 
per cent interest — twelve per cent! It will loan to 
farmers at big interest. It will buy land from poor 
people, split up in small pieces and sell back at four 
hundred per cent profit. Serbians poor now, will 
sell land cheap — but Serbians need land, must have 
land. We are bankrupted here now — you can buy — • 
how do you say? — you can buy all Serbia for a 
music ! Then these bank, she will open in Belgrade 
a permanent exhibition of American products and take 
orders — American shoes, American machines, Amer- 
ican cloth — and in New York she will open one of 
Serbian products and take orders. Make money — 
big ! You shall write about in your papers. If you 
have capitals put in these bank ! " 

On the station a bell was ringing. The station- 
master blew a horn, the engine whistled, the train 
began to move. We tore our lapels from Mr. Obichan's 
thumbs and ran. He raced along with us, still talking. 

39 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"Serbia is very rich country in natural resources," 
he shouted. "Here there is soil for cotton, tobacco, 
silk — very fine alluvial lands. Southern slopes of 
hills for vineyards! Farther up in mountains wheat, 
plums, peaches, apples. In the Machva prunes — " 
We swung on board. "Minerals — " he yelled after 
us. " Gold — copper — Labor cheap — " And then we 
lost his voice. Later on we asked a Serbian official 
about him. 

"Lazar Obichan?" he said. "Yes, we know him. 
He is under observation — suspected of selling military 
secrets to the Austrian Government ! " 

Late in the afternoon we halted on a siding to 
let a military train pass — twelve open flat cars packed 
with soldiers, in odds and ends of uniforms, wrapped 
in clashing and vividly colored blankets. It had be- 
gun to rain a little. A gypsy fiddler played wildly, 
holding his one-stringed violin before him by the 
throat, which was carved rudely to represent a horse's 
head; and about him lay the soldiers, singing the 
newest ballad of the Austrian defeat: 

"The Swabos* came all the way to Ralya, 
But no further came they — 
Hey, Kako to? 
Yoy, Sashto to? 

"They won't soon forget Rashko Pol, 
For there they met the Serbs ! 
Hey, how was that? 
Yoy, why was that ? 
* Swabos — Austrians. 
40 



THE COUNTRY OF DEATH 

"And now the Swabos know 
How the Serbs receive intruders ! 
Hey, Tako to I 
Yoy, that was how !" 

Every regiment has two or three gypsies, who 
march with the troops, playing the Serbian fiddle 
or the bagpipes, and accompany the songs that are 
composed incessantly by the soldiers — love-songs, 
celebrations of victory, epic chants. And all through 
Serbia they are the musicians of the people, travelling 
from one country festa to another, playing for danc- 
ing and singing. Strange substitution ! The gypsies 
have practically replaced the old-time travelling bards, 
the goosslari, who transmitted from generation to gen- 
eration through the far mountain valleys the ancient 
national epics and ballads. And yet they alone in Ser- 
bia have no vote. They have no homes, no villages, no 
land — only their tents and their dilapidated caravans. 

We tossed some packages of cigarettes among 
the soldiers in the cars. For a moment they didn't 
seem to understand. They turned them over and 
over, opened them, stared at us with heavy, slow, 
flat faces. Then light broke — they smiled, nodding 
to us. "Fala" they said gently. "Falalepo! Thanks 
beautifully!" 



41 



THE WAR CAPITAL 

NISH. We took a tumble-down cab — whose bot- 
tom-board immediately fell out — attached to 
two dying horses and driven by a bandit in a high fur 
cap, and jolted up a wide street paved with mud and 
wide-set sharp cobbles. Round about the city the green 
hills rose, beautiful with new leaves and with every 
flowering fruit-tree, and over the wide-flung Turkish 
roofs, and the few mean plaster buildings in the 
European style, loomed the bulbous Greek domes 
of the cathedral. Here and there was the slender 
spire of a minaret, crisscrossed with telephone-wires. 
The street opened into a vast square, a sea of mud 
and cobbles bounded by wretched huts, across 
which marched steel poles carrying hundreds of wires 
and huge modern arc-lights. At one side an ox lay 
on his back, feet clewed up to a wooden beam, while 
peasants shod him with solid iron plates, as they had 
done it for half a thousand years. 

Austrian prisoners in uniform wandered freely 
everywhere, without a guard. Some drove wagons, 
others dug ditches, and hundreds loitered up and 
down in idleness. We learned that by paying fifty 
denars to the government, you could have one for a 
servant. All the legations and consulates were manned 

42 



THE WAR CAPITAL 

with them. And the prisoners were glad to be servants, 
for there was no decent place for them to live, and 
scanty food. Now and then an Austrian officer passed 
along, in full uniform and with his sword. 

"Escape?" said one government official we in- 
terrogated. "No, they do not try. The roads are 
metres deep in mud, the villages are depopulated and 
full of disease, there is no food. ... It is difficult 
enough to travel by train in Serbia — on foot it would 
be impossible. And there are the guards all along 
the frontier. ..." 

We passed a big hospital where pale prisoners 
leaned from the windows upon dirty blankets, dragged 
themselves in and out of the doors, and lay propped 
up on piles of drying mud along the road. These were 
only survivors; for out of the sixty thousand Aus- 
trians captured in the war, twelve thousand were 
already dead of typhus. 

Beyond the square was the street again, between 
rough one-story houses, and we were in the market- 
place. A dull roar rose from the haggling of hun- 
dreds of peasants in ten different national costumes — 
homespun linen embroidered with flowers, high fur 
hats, fezzes, turbans, and infinite varieties and modi- 
fications of Turkish trousers. Pigs squealed, hens 
squawked; underfoot were heaped baskets of eggs 
and herbs and vegetables and red peppers; majestic 
old men in sheepskins shuffled along with lambs in 
their arms. Here was the centre of the town. There 
were two or three restaurants and foul-smelling cafes, 

43 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the dingy Hotel Orient, the inevitable American shoe- 
store, and amid cheap little shops, sudden windows 
ablaze with expensive jewelry and extravagant wom- 
en's hats. 

Along the sidewalks elbowed a multitude of 
strangely assorted people: gypsies, poverty-stricken 
peasants, gendarmes with great swords, in red and 
blue uniforms, tax-collectors dressed like generals, 
also with swords, smart army officers hung with 
medals, soldiers in filthy tatters, their feet bound with 
rags — soldiers limping, staggering on crutches, with- 
out arms, without legs, discharged from the over- 
crowded hospitals still blue and shaking from the 
typhus — and everywhere the Austrian prisoners. Gov- 
ernment officials hurried by with portfolios under 
their arms. Fat Jewish army contractors hobnobbed 
with political hangers-on over maculate cafe tables. 
Women government clerks, wives and mistresses of 
officers, society ladies, shouldered the peasant women 
in their humped-up gay skirts and high-colored socks. 
The government from Belgrade had taken refuge in 
Nish, and a mountain village of twenty thousand in- 
habitants had become a city of one hundred and 
twenty thousand — not counting those who died. 

For the typhus had swept the town, where 
people were living six and ten in a room, until every- 
where the black flags flapped in long, sinister vistas, 
and the windows of the cafes were plastered with black 
paper death-notices. 

We crossed the muddy Nishava River on the 
44 




DISCHARGED FROM A TYPHUS HOSPITAL. 



THE WAR CAPITAL £ 

bridge which leads to the heavy, arabesqued gate of 
the ancient Turkish citadel, which was Roman before 
the Turks, and where Constantine the Great was 
born. On the grass along the foot of the great wall 
sprawled hundreds of soldiers, sleeping, scratching 
themselves, stripping and searching their bodies for 
lice, tossing and twisting in fever. Everywhere about 
Nish, wherever there was a spot of worn grass, the 
miserable people clustered, picking vermin from each 
other. 

The stench of the city was appalling. In the 
side streets open sewers trickled down among the 
cobbles. Some sanitary measures had been taken — 
such as the closing of cafes and restaurants from two 
o'clock until six every day in order to disinfect them 
— but still it was an even chance of typhus if you 
stayed in a hotel or public building. Luckily the 
hospitable American vice-consul, Mr. Young, took 
us in at the consulate and introduced us at the Diplo- 
matic Club, which had dining-rooms over an aban- 
doned restaurant, and where good food was to be got 

• 

when half the town was starving. The entrance was 
through a pigsty, after stepping across an open sewer; 
and when you opened the club-room door, your aston- 
ished eyes encountered tables, decorated with flowers 
and covered with silver and snowy linen, and a head 
waiter in smart evening dress, an Austrian prisoner by 
the name of Fritz, who had been head waiter at the 
Carlton in London before the war. To see the British 
minister sail majestically past the pigsty and mount 

45 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the club stairs as if it were Piccadilly was a thing worth 
coming miles for. 

Such was Nishj as we first saw it. Two weeks 
later we returned, after the rains had altogether 
ceased, and the hot sun had dried the streets. It was 
a few days after the feast of St. George, which marks 
the coming of the spring in Serbia. On that day all 
Serbia rises at dawn and goes out into the woods and 
fields, gathering flowers and dancing and singing and 
feasting all day. And even here, in this filthy, over- 
crowded town, with the tragic sadness of war and 
pestilence over every house, the streets were a gay 
sight. The men peasants had changed their dirty 
heavy woollens and sheepskins for the summer suit of 
embroidered dazzling linen. All the women wore new 
dresses and new silk kerchiefs, decorated with knots 
of ribbon, with leaves and flowers — even the ox-yokes 
and the oxen's heads were bound with purple lilac 
branches. Through the streets raced mad young 
gypsy girls in Turkish trousers of extravagant and 
gorgeous colors, their bodices gleaming with gold 
braid, gold coins hung in their ears. And I remember 
five great strapping women with mattocks over their 
shoulders, who marched singing down the middle of the 
road to take their dead men's places in the work of 
the fields. 

We were received by Colonel Soubotitch, chief 
of the Red Cross, in his headquarters. He described 

the terrible lack of all medical necessities in Serbia, 

46 



THE WAR CAPITAL 

and painted us a graphic picture of people dying in 
the streets of Nish only a month before. I noticed a 
handsome peasant blanket on his bed. 

"My mother wove that for me," he said simply, 
" in the village where I live. She is a peasant. We 
are all peasants in Serbia — that is our pride. Voy- 
voda Putnik, commander-in-chief of the army, is a 
poor man; his father was a peasant. Voyvoda Mi- 
chitch, who won the great battle that hurled the Aus- 
trian army from our country, is a peasant. Many of 
the deputies to the Skouptchina, our parliament, are 
peasants, who sit there in peasant dress." He stared 
at the bed. "And on that bed, on that very blanket 
which you so admired, I stood here where I now stand 
and watched my son die of the typhus, two months 
ago. What will you? We must do our duty. ..." 

He threw back his shoulders with a visible effort. 
"So you want to see a typhus hospital? Ah, they 
are not interesting now. The worst is over. But I 
will give you a letter to Stanoievitch, at Chere Kula." 

We drove to Chere Kula, a mile out of town, 
late one sombre afternoon in the pouring rain. The 
name is Turkish, meaning "Mound of Skulls"; it is 
literally a tower of skulls of Serbian warriors, erected 
near the site of a great battle fought more than a cen- 
tury ago, as a monument to the Turkish victory. 
Lieutenant Stanoievitch, in command of the hospital, 
unlocked the Greek chapel which the Serbians have 
built over the holy spot. In the dim light it loomed 
there, completely rilling the chapel, a great round 

47 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

tower of clay with a few grinning heads still embedded 
in it, and draped with wreaths of faded flowers. 

Around this sinister memorial were grouped the 
brick buildings of the typhus hospital, and the wooden 
barracks where the overflow was lodged. The wind 
set our way, carrying the stench of bodies sweating 
with fever, of sick men eating, of the rotting of flesh. 
We entered a barrack, along whose walls cots lay 
touching each other, and in the feeble light of two 
lanterns we could see the patients writhing in their 
dirty blankets, five and six crowded into two beds. 
Some sat up, apathetically eating; others lay like the 
dead; still others gave short, grunting moans, or 
shouted suddenly in the grip of delirium. The hos- 
pital orderlies, who slept in the same room, were all 
Austrian prisoners. 

"I have been put in charge of this hospital only 
three days," said the lieutenant. "Before I came it 
was pretty bad. Now we have only twenty deaths a 
day. There are eight hundred patients — you see, we 
have no room for even these." 

We passed through fetid ward after fetid ward, 
smelling of decomposition and death, until we were 
wrung with the helplessness of these big men, and 
our stomachs were turned with the stench. 

Later, we dined with Stanoievitch and his staff 
of young doctors and medical students. The good 
red wine of the country went around, and in a gay 
and lively argument about the war we forgot for a 
moment the poor devils dying on the other side of 

48 




A HOSPITAL AT NISH. 
In the feeble light of two lanterns we could see the patients writhing in their dirty blankets. 



THE WAR CAPITAL 

the wall. Stanoievitch, flushed with wine, was boast- 
ing of how the Serbians had smashed the Austrian 
army. 

"What are these French and English doing?" 
he cried impatiently. "Why do they not beat the Ger- 
mans? What they need there are a few Serbians to 
show them how to make war. We Serbians know that 
all that is needed is the willingness to die — and the 
war would soon be over . . . !" 



49 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

NEXT morning early we were on our way to Kra- 
guijevatz, the army headquarters. Our train 
was loaded with ammunition and American flour for 
the army at the front, and we carried five cars full of 
soldiers, in sheepskins, peasant dress, and Austrian uni- 
forms picked up in the rout of December — one man 
even wore a German casque. They sang an inter- 
minable ballad to a minor air, about how old King 
Peter went to the trenches during the battle of Kolu- 
bara River: 

"Krai Peter rose from his bed one morning 
[And said to his dearly beloved son, Prince Alexander, 

.'0 brave, courageous Prince, my son 

iWho leads so well the army of Serbia, 

The Swabos have passed Kroupaign, — 

Their powerful hosts, like the rushing Morava, 

Have passed Valievo. . . . 

I shall go forth to conquer or to die with them !' 

He girt upon him his bright sword. . . ." 

The railway line paralleled the Morava River. 
Here all was green, and in the black loam of the fields 
women were ploughing with oxen, and winding wool 
on distaffs as they ploughed. White, low, tiled houses, 
their balconies overhung with graceful Turkish arches, 
their corners painted in colored lozenges, lay hidden 

50 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

amid plum and apple trees in bloom. Beyond them 
stretched meadows under water, where thousands of 
frogs made a gigantic croaking chorus ; audible above 
the roaring of the train — for the Morava was in flood. 
We passed Teshitza, Bagrdan, Dedrevatz, Lapovo, 
smelling of formalin and spattered with sinister white 
— pest-holes all. 

At Kraguijevatz we were met by a delegate from 
the Press Bureau, erstwhile lecturer on comparative 
literature at the University of Belgrade. He was a 
large-featured, absent-minded young man with fat 
knees incased in pearl riding-breeches, a bright-green 
felt hat over one ear, and a naughty twinkle in his 
eye. Within two hours we were calling him "John- 
son," which is a literal translation of his name. 

Johnson knew every one, and every one knew 
him. He kept up a running scandalous comment on 
the people that we passed, and would halt the cab 
for long periods while he got out and exchanged the 
latest spicy gossip with some friend. Finally, we 
would shout to him: "For Heaven's sake, Johnson, 
hurry up ! " 

"Excuse me, sair!" he would respond solemnly. 
"You must have patience. Thees is war-time !" 

We found the chief of the Press Bureau, former 
professor of public law at the University of Belgrade, 
hard at work reading a novel of George Meredith. 
Johnson explained that the Press Bureau was a very 
important and active organization. 

Si 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"We make here many jokes about prominent 
people, epigrams, and rhymes. For instance, one of 
the conspirators in the assassination of the Archduke 
Ferdinand was an officer of the Serbian army during 
the retreat. He feared that he would be recognized 
if taken prisoner, so he shaved his beard. In the Press 
Bureau we have made a sonnet about him, in which 
we said that it was in vain to shave his beard when 
he could not shave his prominent nose! Yes, sair. 
In the Press Bureau we make sometimes two hun- 
dred sonnets a day." 

Johnson was a dramatist of note. He had trans- 
planted to the Serbian stage the Comedie Rosse of the 
Theatre Antoine, and had been ostracized by respecta- 
ble society. "Because," he explained, "my play was 
obscene. But it was true to Serbian life, and that is 
the ideal of art, don't you think?" 

Johnson was saturated with European culture, 
European smartness, cynicism, modernism; yet scratch 
the surface and you found the Serb; the strong, virile 
stock of a young race not far removed from the half- 
savagery of a mountain peasantry, intensely patriotic 
and intensely independent. 

But many Serbian "intellectuals" are like the 
city of Belgrade, where only three years ago the peas- 
ants drove their creaking ox-carts along unpaved 
streets deep in mud, between one-story houses like 
the houses of Nish — and which now puts on the build- 
ings, the pavements, the airs and vices of Paris and 
Vienna. They affect modern art, modern music, the 

52 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

tango and fox-trot. They ridicule the songs and 
costumes of the peasants. 

Sometimes these affectations are laughable. We 
rode during all one day on horseback over the battle- 
field of Goutchevo Mountain with a young officer — 
also of the university faculty — who had lived for 
three years the life of a fighting nomad, such as no 
Englishman, Frenchman, or German could have en- 
dured. He had gone through the terrible retreat, and 
still more terrible attack of that winter campaign, 
sleeping out in the rain or in huts full of vermin, eating 
the coarse food of the peasants or no food, and thriv- 
ing on it. 

"I am so fond of the country," he said as we rode 
along. "It is so pastoral, don't you think? I am al- 
ways reminded of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony 
when I am in the country." He whistled a few bars 
abstractedly. "No, I made a mistake. That is the 
Third, isn't it?" 

We discovered afterward that his father was a 
peasant, and all his forebears since the Serbs first 
came down from the plains of Hungary had been 
peasants, and had lived in this "country" which re- 
minded him only of Beethoven ! 

And in Serbia they are still sensitive about Shaw's 
"Arms and the Man." . . . 

We dined at the general staff mess, in the rude 
throne-room of the palace of Milan Obrenovitch, first 
of the Serbian kings; his gaudy red-plush-and-gilt 
throne still stands there, and on the walls are pictures 

53 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

of Milosh Obilich and the other heroes of Serbia's 
stormy history, and of the Serbian comitadji leaders 
who died by the hands of the Turks in Macedonia in 
the years before the Balkan War. 

"This palace is one of our oldest national monu- 
ments, " said Johnson. "It was built more than fifty 
years ago." 

Astonishing, the youth of the kingdom of Serbia. 
Less than a hundred years have passed since she 
emerged as a free state from five centuries of Turkish 
domination — and in that time what a history she has 
had! 

The secret dream of every Serb is the uniting of 
all the Serbian peoples in one great empire: Hun- 
garian Croatia, identical in race and spoken language 
— Dalmatia, home of Serbian literature — Bosnia, foun- 
tain-head of Serbian poetry and song — Montenegro, 
Herzegovina, and Slovenia. An empire fifteen millions 
strong, reaching from Bulgaria to the Adriatic, and 
from Trieste, east and north, far into the plains of 
Hungary, which will liberate the energies of the fight- 
ing, administrative people of the kingdom of Serbia, 
penned in their narrow mountain valleys, to the ex- 
ploitation of the rich plains country, and the powerful 
life of ships at sea. 

Every peasant soldier knows what he is fighting 
for. When he was a baby, his mother greeted him, 
"Hail, little avenger of Kossovo!" (At the battle of 
Kossovo, in the fourteenth century, Serbia fell under 
the Turks.) When he had done something wrong, 

54 




"A_LITTLE AVENGER OF KOSSOVOv 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

his mother reproved him thus: "Not that way will 
you deliver Macedonia!" The ceremony of passing 
from infancy to boyhood was marked by the recita- 
tion of an ancient poem: 

"Ja sam Serbin," 
it began, 

" I am a Serbian, born to be a soldier, 
Son of Iliya, of Milosh, of Vasa, of Marko." 

(National heroes, whose exploits here followed at 
length) 

" My brothers are numerous as grapes in the vineyard, 
But they are less fortunate than I, a son of free Serbia ! 
Therefore must I grow quickly, learn to sing and shoot, 
That I may hasten to help those who wait for me ! " 

And in the Serbian schools the children are 
taught not only the geography of old Serbia, but of 
all the Serbian lands, in the order of their redemption — 
first Macedonia, then Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, 
Croatia, Banat, and Batchka ! 

Now Kossovo is avenged and Macedonia de- 
livered, within the lifetime of these soldiers who lis- 
tened to their mothers and never forgot their "broth- 
ers, numerous as grapes in the vineyard." But even 
while we were in Serbia, other complications threat- 
ened. 

"What if Italy takes Dalmatia?" I asked a 
government official. 

"It is very exasperating," he replied, "for it 
55 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

means that after we have recovered from this war 
we must fight again ! " 

An old officer that we met later said, with a sort 
of holy enthusiasm: "We thought that this dream of 
a great Serbia would come true — but many years in 
the future, many years. And here it is realized in 
our time ! This is something' to die for !" 

And the boy who sang "Son of Free Serbia" has 
made his country one of the most democratic in the 
world. It is governed by the Skouptchina, a one- 
chamber parliament elected by universal suffrage and 
proportional representation — the Senate, derisively 
known as the "Museum," was abolished in 1903. 
King Alexander tried to rule autocratically, and they 
murdered him; the present King is strictly a figurehead, 
limited by a liberal constitution. There is no aristoc- 
racy in Serbia. Only the King's brother and the 
King's sons are princes, and to the Crown Prince Re- 
gent the ultra-democrats and Socialists refuse even that 
title, referring to him always as the "Manifest-Signer." 
Queen Draga attempted to establish an order of 
nobility, "but," as Johnson said, laughing, "wekeelled 
her!" 

The great landlords of Rumania are unknown in 
Serbia. Here every peasant has a right to five acres 
of land, inalienable for debt or taxes; he joins fields 
with his sons and daughters and nephews and nieces, 
until all through Serbia there exist co-operative estates 
known as zadrougas, where generations of one family, 
with its ramifications, live together in communal own- 

56 - 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

ership of all their property. And as yet there is no in- 
dustrial population in Serbia, and few rich men. 

That night we heard the dramatic story of the 
great Serbian victory of December. Twice the Aus- 
trians invaded the country, and twice were hurled 
back, and the streets of Valievo groaned with wounded 
lying in the rain. But the second time the enemy held 
Shabatz, Losnitza, and the two rich provinces of 
Machva and Podrigna, and the heights of Goutchevo. 
The Serbians could not dislodge them from their 
strongly intrenched positions. And then, in the 
bitter weather of December, the Austrians began the 
third invasion with five hundred thousand men against 
two hundred and fifty thousand. Pouring across the 
frontier at three widely separated points, they broke 
the Serbian lines and rolled the little army back among 
its mountains. Belgrade was abandoned to the enemy. 
Twice the Serbians made a desperate stand, and twice 
they were forced to fall back. Ammunition began to 
fail — the cannon had less than twenty shells apiece. 
The enemy passed Krupaign and Valievo and was 
within forty-five miles of Kraguijevatz, headquarters 
of the Serbian general staff. 

And then, at the last minute, something hap- 
pened. New supplies of ammunition arrived from 
Salonika, and the younger officers revolted against 
their more cautious elders, shouting that it was as well 
to die attacking as to be slaughtered in the trenches. 
General Michitch ordered an offensive. The beaten 

57 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Serbians, rushing from their trenches, fell upon the 
leisurely Austrian columns coming along narrow 
mountain denies to attack. Caught on the march, 
burdened with big guns and heavy baggage-trains on 
roads almost impassable from mud, the Austrians re- 
sisted furiously, but were forced to recoil. The line 
was broken. Their centre, smashed by Michitch and 
the first army, broke and fled in panic across the coun- 
try, abandoning baggage, ammunition, and guns, and 
leaving behind thousands of dead and wounded, and 
hospitals crammed with men raving with typhus. 
This is how the typhus, beginning somewhere up in 
the plains of Hungary, entered Serbia with the Aus- 
trian army. For a time the left wing tried to hold 
Belgrade, but the exultant, ragged Serbians drove 
them literally into the River Save and shot them as 
they swam across. 

This great battle, which Voyvoda Michitch re- 
ported laconically with the proud telegram, "There 
remain no Austrian soldiers on Serbian soil except 
prisoners," has been given no name. Some call it the 
Battle of Kolubara River and others the Battle of 
Valievo. But it is, perhaps, the most wonderful feat 
of arms in all the great World War. 

At the right hand of the colonel sat a pope in the 
long black robes of the Greek Church. He was not 
unctuous and sly like the Greeks, however — a great 
ruddy man who laughed uproariously and drank his 
wine with the officers. These Serbian priests are re- 
markable people. They are the teachers, the trans- 

58 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

mitters of patriotism among the peasants. They are 
elected to the Skouptchina as deputies of districts. 

"Why not?" he said in French. "In Serbia 
there is no Clerical party. We are all one here — eh?" 
He turned to the colonel, who nodded. "I have now 
been fighting in the army for three years — not as a 
priest, but as a Serbian soldier. Yes, we are the State 
Church, but the government also subsidizes the Prot- 
estant and Catholic Churches, and even the Mo- 
hammedan hadjis. Why, it is really extraordinary. 
The government pays the Mohammedan mufti thirty 
thousand denars a year, and the metropolitan of the 
Serbian Church only gets twenty thousand! Our 
people do not forget that Milan Obrenovitch pro- 
claimed the revolution against the Turks at a village 
church, with a pope at his side. We are Serbs and men 
first, and priests afterward." He laughed. "Have 
you heard the story of how the Serbian bishop, 
Duchitch, shocked the Bishop of London? No? 
Well, they dined together in England. 

" 'You are fortunate,' said the Bishop of London, 
'in your people. I am told they are very devout/ 

" 'Yes,' said Mr. Duchitch, 'in Serbia we do not 
trust too much to God. We prayed God five centuries 
to free us from the Turks, and finally took guns and 
did it ourselves!' " 

It was midnight when we took the train for Bel- 
grade, less than a hundred kilometres away, but by 
morning we were still far from the city. We crawled 

59 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

slowly along, waiting hours on sidings for the passing 
of trains going north laden with soldiers and with 
supplies, and empty trains going south; for we were 
now within the lines of the Army of the Danube, and 
on the main military artery serving fifty thousand 
men. It was a region of high, rolling hills, and here 
and there a loftier mountain crowned with the ruined 
castle of some Dahee overlord, dating from Turkish 
days. There was no longer any pretense of cultivation. 
Hillside after hillside hollowed into caves or covered 
with huts of mud and straw housed the ragged regi- 
ments; trenches gashed in the sloping meadows criss- 
crossed that hard-fought ground — and in spots where 
the battle had been particularly fierce, the jagged 
stumps of great oak-trees stood branchless and leaf- 
less, stripped bare by the hail of shells and rifle- 
bullets. 

The railway-station of Belgrade had been de- 
stroyed in the bombardment, and one by one the search- 
ing Austrian cannon had wrecked the nearer stations, 
so we were forced to leave the train at Rakovitza, six 
miles out, and drive to the city. The road wound 
through a beautiful, fertile valley, with white villas 
and farmhouses smothered in thick blooming chest- 
nuts. Nearer town we entered the shaded road of an 
immense park, where in summer the fashionable world 
of Belgrade comes to show its smartest carriages and 
its newest gowns. Now the roads were weedy, the 
lawns dusty and unkempt. A shell had wrecked the 

summer pavilion. Under the big trees at the edge of 

60 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

an ornamental fountain a troop of cavalry was picketed, 
and a little farther on the tennis-court had been disem- 
bowelled to make emplacements for two French cannon 
— the French sailors of the gun crew, lying around on 
the grass, shouted gayly to us. 

Our carriage had taken a left-hand road, leading 
toward the River Save, when suddenly a distant deep 
booming fell upon our ears. It was like nothing else 
in the world, the double boom of big cannon, and the 
shrill flight of shells. And now, nearer at hand, off 
to the left, other great guns answered. A two-horsed 
cab, its horses galloping, appeared around a turn 
ahead, and a fat officer leaned out as he passed us. 

"Don't go that way!" he shouted. "Putzaiyu! 
They are firing on the road! The English batteries 
are replying ! " 

We turned around and took a long detour that 
led around to the right. For about a quarter of an 
hour the far shooting continued — then it ceased. A 
deep, steady humming had been growing more and 
more audible for some time, rilling all the air. Sud- 
denly there came the heavy, sharp crack of a detona- 
tion over our heads. We looked up. There, im- 
measurably high, gleaming like a pale dragon-fly in 
the sun, an aeroplane hovered. Her lower planes 
were painted in concentric circles of red and blue. 
"French!" said Johnson. She was already turning 
slowly toward the east and south. Behind her, not 
more than a hundred yards it seemed, the white puff 
of an exploding shrapnel slowly flowered. Even as 

61 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

we looked, another distant gun spoke, and another, 
and the shells leaped after her as she drifted out of 
our vision behind the trees. 

We crawled up a steep hill and descended the 
other side along a straight, white, unpaved road. In 
front of us, perched on a high headland between the 
Danube and the Save, was Belgrade, the Beograd of 
the Serbians, the White City which was ancient when 
they first came down from the Hungarian mountains, 
and yet is one of the youngest of the world's cities. 
Down at the bottom of the hill a long double file of 
Austrian prisoners, dusty with the long march from 
Rackovitza, stood patiently in the sun while two Ser- 
bian officers questioned them. 

"Of what race are you?" 

"I am a Serb from Bosnia, gospodine" answered 
the prisoner, grinning. 

"And you?" 

" Kratti " (Croat) " of the mountains." 

"Well, brothers," said the officer, "this is a nice 
thing for you to be fighting for the Swabos ! " 

"Ah!" answered the Croat. "We asked permis- 
sion to fight with you, but they wouldn't let us." 
Every one laughed. 

"And what race are you?" 

"Italiano from Trieste." 

"Tchek." 

"I am Magyar!" growled a sullen-faced, squat 
man with a look of hate. 

"And you?" 

62 



TOWARD THE FRONT 

"I am Rumaniassi" (Rumanian), said the last 
man proudly. 

A few hundred yards farther along was a great 
shed stored with all sorts of provisions, fodder, hay, 
and grain for the army. Here in the hot sun the Aus- 
trian prisoners were sweating at their work of loading 
ox-carts with sacks of flour, their uniforms, hands, and 
faces caked with white meal. A sentry with a bay- 
onetted rifle walked up and down in front of them, 
and as he walked he chanted: 

"God bless my grandfather, Vladislav Wenz, 
who came to settle in Serbia forty years ago. If he 
hadn't, I would now be packing flour with these 
prisoners ! " 



63 



BELGRADE UNDER THE AUSTRIAN GUNS 

OUR carriage rattled, echoing through silent Bel- 
grade. Grass and weeds pushed between the 
cobbles, untravelled now for half a year. The sound of 
guns had entirely ceased. A hot sun blazed down, daz- 
zling on the white walls of the houses, and a little 
warm wind whirled spirals of white dust from the un- 
paved roadway; it was hard to imagine that the Aus- 
trian big guns dominated us, and that any moment 
they might bombard the city, as they had a dozen 
times before. Everywhere were visible the "effects of 
artillery fire. Great holes fifteen feet in diameter gaped 
in the middle of the street. A shell had smashed the 
roof of the Military College and exploded within, 
shattering all the windows; the west wall of the War 
Office had sloughed down under a concentrated fire 
of heavy guns; the Italian legation was pitted and 
scarred by shrapnel, and the flag hung ragged from its 
broken pole. Doorless private houses, with roofs 
cascading to the sidewalks, showed window-frames 
swinging idly askew without a pane of glass. Along 
that crooked boulevard which is Belgrade's main and 
the only paved street, the damage was worse. Shells 
had dropped through the roof of the Royal Palace 
and gutted the interior. As we passed, a draggled 

64 



BELGRADE UNDER THE AUSTRIAN GUNS 

peacock, which had once adorned the Royal Gardens, 
stood screaming in a ruined window, while a laughing 
group of soldiers clustered on the sidewalk under- 
neath imitating it. Hardly anything had escaped 
that hail of fire — houses, sheds, stables, hotels, res- 
taurants, shops, and public buildings — and there were 
many fresh ruins from the latest bombardment, only 
ten days before. A five-story office-building with the 
two top floors blown off by a 30.5-centimetre shell 
exhibited a half section of a room — an iron bed hang- 
ing perilously in the air, and flowered wall-paper 
decorated with framed pictures, untouched by the 
freak of the explosion. The University of Belgrade 
was only a mass of yawning ruins. The Austrians 
had made it their special target, for there had been 
the hotbed of Pan-Serbian propaganda, and among 
the students was formed the secret society whose 
members murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 

We met an officer who belonged to this society 
— a classmate of the assassin. "Yes," he said, "the 
government knew. It tried to discourage us, but it 
could do nothing. Of course the government did not 
countenance our propaganda." He grinned and 
winked. "But how could it prevent? Our constitu- 
tion guarantees the freedom of assemblies and or- 
ganizations. . . . We are a free country!" 

Johnson was unmoved by the wreck. 

"For years we have been cramped and incon- 
venienced in that old building," he explained. "But 
the University was too poor to build again. Now we 

65 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

shall demand in the terms of peace one of the German 
universities — libraries, laboratories, and all complete. 
They have many, and we have only one. We have 
not yet decided whether to ask for Heidelberg or 
Bonn. . . ." 

Already people were beginning to drift back to 
the city which they had deserted six months before, 
at the time of the first bombardment. Every evening, 
toward sundown, the streets became more and more 
crowded. A few stores timidly opened, some restau- 
rants, and the cafes where the true Belgradian spends 
all his time sipping beer and watching the fashion- 
able world pass. Johnson kept up a flow of comment 
on the people who sat at tables, or went by along the 
street. 

"You see that little, important-looking man with 
the glasses? He is Mr. R , who is very ambi- 
tious and thinks himself a great man. He is editor 
of an insignificant newspaper called La Depeche, which 
he published here every day under the bombardment, 
and imagined himself a great hero. But there is a 
little song about him which is sung all over Belgrade: 

"'An Austrian cannon-ball flew through the air. 
It said: "Now I shall destroy Belgrade, the White City"; 
But when it saw that it would hit R 



It held its nose, crying " Phoot ! " — and went the other way ! ' " 

In the corner a stout, dirty man with the look 
of a Jewish politician was holding forth to a crowd. 

"That is S , editor of the Mali Journal 

66 




LOOKING TOWARD AUSTRIA. 



BELGRADE UNDER THE AUSTRIAN GUNS 

There are three brothers, one of them a trick bicycle- 
rider. This man and the other brother founded a 
little paper here which lived by blackmailing prom- 
inent people. They were desperately poor. No one 
would pay the blackmail. So they published every 
day for two weeks a photograph of the bicycle-rider 
with his bare legs, bare arms, and medals on his chest, 
so that some heiress with millions of denars would 
become enamoured of his beautiful physique and 
marry him!" 

We visited the ancient Turkish citadel which 
crowns the abrupt headland towering over the junc- 
tion of the Save and the Danube. Here, where the 
Serbian guns had been placed, the Austrian fire had 
fallen heaviest; hardly a building but had been literally 
wrecked. Roads and open spaces were pitted with 
craters torn by big shells. All the trees were stripped. 
Between two shattered walls we crawled on our bellies 
to the edge of the cliff overlooking the river. 

"Don't show yourselves," cautioned the captain 
who had us in charge. "Every time the Swabos see 
anything moving here, they drop us a shell." 

From the edge there was a magnificent view of 
the muddy Danube in flood, inundated islands stick- 
ing tufts of tree tops above the water, and the wide 
plains of Hungary drowned in a yellow sea to the 
horizon. Two miles away, across the Save, the Aus- 
trian town of Semlin slept in radiant sunlight. On 
that low height' to the west and south were planted 

67 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the invisible threatening cannon. And beyond, fol- 
lowing southwest the winding Save as far as the eye 
could see, the blue mountains of Bosnia piled up 
against the pale sky. Almost immediately below us 
lay the broken steel spans of the international rail- 
way bridge which used to link Constantinople to 
western Europe — plunging prodigiously from their 
massive piers into the turbid yellow water. And up- 
stream still was the half-sunken island of Tzigalnia, 
where the Serbian advance-guards lay in their trenches 
and sniped the enemy on another island four hundred 
yards away across the water. The captain pointed 
to several black dots lying miles away up the Danube 
behind the shoulder of Semlin. 

"Those are the Austrian monitors," he said. 
"And that low black launch that lies close in to shore 
down there to the east, she is the English gunboat. 
Last night she stole up the river and torpedoed an 
Austrian monitor. We expect the city to be bom- 
barded any minute now. The Austrians usually take 
it out on Belgrade." 

But the day passed and there was no sign from 
the enemy, except once when a French aeroplane 
soared up over the Save. Then white shrapnel cracked 
over our heads, and long after the biplane had slanted 
down eastward again, the guns continued to fire, 
miles astern. 

"They have learned their lesson," said Johnson 
complacently. "The last time they bombarded Bel- 
grade, they were answered by the big English, French, 

68 



BELGRADE UNDER THE AUSTRIAN GUNS 

and Russian naval guns, which they did not know 
were here. We bombarded Semlin and silenced two 
Austrian positions." 

We made the tour of the foreign batteries with 
the captain next day. The French guns and their 
marines were posted among trees on the top of a high, 
wooded hill overlooking the Save. They were served 
by French marines. Farther along Russian sailors 
lolled on the grass about their heavy cannon, and on 
the sloping meadows back of Belgrade lay the British, 
guarding the channel of the Danube against the Aus- 
trian supply-boats which were moored above Semlin, 
waiting for a chance to slip past down the Danube, 
with guns and ammunition for the Turks. The Ser- 
bian batteries were a queer mixture of ordnance; there 
were old field-guns made by Creusot in France for 
the First Balkan War, ancient bronze pieces cast for 
King Milan in the Turkish War, and all kinds and 
calibers captured from the Austrians — German field- 
guns, artillery manufactured in Vienna for the Sultan, 
ornamented with Turkish symbols, and new cannon 
ordered by Yuan Shi Kai, their breeches covered 
with Chinese characters. 

Our window looked out over the roofs of the city 
to the broad current of the Save, and the sinister high- 
land beyond where the enemy's guns were. At night 
the great Austrian search-light would flare suddenly 
upon the stream and the city, blinding; sparks would 
leap and die among the trees of the river islands, and 

69 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

we would hear the pricking rifle-fire where the out- 
posts lay in mud with their feet in the water, and 
killed each other in the dark. One night the English 
batteries roared behind the town, and their shells 
whistled over our heads as they drove back the Aus- 
trian monitors who were trying to creep down the 
river. Then the invisible guns of the highland across 
the Save spat red; for an hour heavy missiles hurtled 
through the sky, exploding miles back about the 
smoking English guns — the ground shook where we 
stood. 

"So you want to visit the trenches," said the 
captain. We had driven out a mile or so through the 
outskirts of the city that lay along the Save, always 
in sight of the Austrian guns. Our carriages were 
spaced two hundred yards apart, for two vehicles to- 
gether would have drawn fire. Where we stood the 
shore jutted out into the flooded river behind the trees 
of a submerged island that screened us from the Aus- 
trian bank. "It is not very safe. We must go in 
a boat and pass three hundred yards of open water 
commanded by an Austrian cannon." 

The aged launch was supposed to be armored; 
a heavy sheet of tin roofed her engine-pit, and thin 
steel plates leaned against the bulwarks. As soon 
as we rounded the protecting curtain of trees, the 
soldier who was pilot, engineer, and crew stood up 
and shook his fist at the point of land where the Aus- 
trian gun lay. 

70 



BELGRADE UNDER THE AUSTRIAN GUNS 

"Oh, cowards and sons of cowards!" he chanted. 
"Why do you not fire, Swabo cowards? Does the 
sight of unarmed Serbians cause your knees to knock 
together?" 

This he kept up until the launch slipped out of 
range behind Tzigalnia, alongside a huge cargo-scow, 
painted black and loopholed for rifles. On her bow, 
in large yellow letters, was Neboysha, which is Ser- 
bian for "Dreadnought." 

"That is the Serbian navy," laughed the cap- 
tain. "With her we have fought a great battle. In 
January, one dark night, we filled her full of soldiers 
and let her float down the river. That is how we cap- 
tured this island." 

From the Neboysha a precarious plank foot- 
bridge on floating logs led between half-submerged 
willow-trees to a narrow strip of land not more than 
ten feet wide and two hundred yards long. Here the 
soldiers had dug their rude rifle-pits, and here they 
lay forward on the muddy embankment, unshaven, 
unwashed, clothed in rags, and gaunt with scanty, 
bad food. From head to foot they were the color of 
mud, like animals. Many of the trenches were below 
the flood level, and held water; you could see where, 
only two days before, the river had risen until it was 
up to the men's waists. We could not walk along the 
line of trenches — soldiers poled us up and down in 
little scows. 

A score of shaggy, big men in fur caps, with rifle- 
belts crossed over their chests and hand bombs slung 

7i 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

at their shoulders, were at work under an armed guard, 
surlily digging trenches. These were comitadjis, the 
captain said — irregular volunteers without uniform, 
drawn from the half-bandits, half-revolutionists, who 
had been making desperate guerilla war against 
Turks, Bulgarians, and Greeks in Macedonia for 
years. 

"They are under arrest," he explained. "They 
refused to dig trenches or work on' the roads. 'We 
have come to fight the Swabos,' they said, 'not to 
dig ditches. We are warriors, not laborers ! ' " 

Removing our hats, we peered cautiously through 
the gaps made for the rifles; a similar barren neck of 
land appeared about four hundred yards away through 
the tree tops rising from the water — for all this had 
once been land — where the Austrians lay. A blue 
peaked cap bobbed cautiously up — the soldier beside 
me grunted and fired. Almost immediately there 
was a scattering burst of shots from the enemy. Bul- 
lets whined close over our heads, and from the trees 
green leaves showered down. 

Our boatman thrust off from the Neboysha and 
headed the launch up-stream before he rounded into 
the channel swept by the Austrian artillery, a quarter 
of a mile away. 

"We will go closer," said he; "perhaps it will 
tempt them." 

The clumsy, chugging boat swept clear. He 
72 



BELGRADE UNDER THE AUSTRIAN GUNS 

stood up in the stern, cupped his hands, and bellowed 
a satirical verse that the soldiers sang: 

"The Emperor Nicholas rides a black horse, 
The Emperor Franz Joseph rides a mule — 
And he put the bridle on the tail instead of the head, 
So now is the end of Austria ! " 

Hardly had he finished — the boat was within 
fifty yards of the sheltering island — when a sudden 
detonation stunned us. We hit the bottom of the 
boat with one simultaneous thud just as something 
screamed three yards over our heads, and the roof 
of a building on the shore heaved up with a roar, 
rilling the air with whistling fragments of tiles and 
lead pellets — shrapnel. 

"Whoop!" shouted the steersman. "There's 
enough black balls to defeat any candidate!" 

Now we were behind the sheltering trees. A row- 
boat full of soldiers put off from the bank, paddling 
frantically. 

"Don't go out there !" cried the captain to them. 
"They are firing!" 

"That's why we're going!" they cried alto- 
gether, like children. "Perhaps they'll take a shot 
at us!" They rounded the island with shouts and a 
prodigious splashing of oars. . . . 

Lunch was ready in the ruins of a great sugar 
factory, where the colonel in command of the island 
had his headquarters. To get to it, we crossed a 

73 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

bridge of planks laid on a quaking marsh of brown 
sugar — tons and tons of it, melted when the Austrian 
shells had set fire to the place. 

The colonel, two captains, four lieutenants, a 
corporal, and two privates sat down with us. In Serbia 
the silly tradition that familiarity between officers 
and men destroys discipline apparently does not exist. 
Many times in restaurants we noticed a private or 
a non-commissioned officer approach a table where 
officers sat, salute stiffly, and then shake hands all 
around and sit down. And here the sergeant who 
waited on table took his place between us to drink 
his coffee and was formally introduced. 

One of the privates had been secretary of the 
Serbian National Theatre before the war. He told 
us that the charter required fifty performances of 
Shakespeare a season, and that the Serbians pre- 
ferred Coriolanus to all the other plays. 

"Hamlet," he said, "was very popular. But we 
have not played it here for fifteen years, for the only 
actor who could do the part died in 1900." 



74 



ALONG THE BATTLE-LINE 

A THOUSAND feet up two French aeroplanes 
hummed slowly west, translucent in the clear 
morning sunlight. Below and to the left lazy shrapnel 
burst. The sound of the explosions and the humming 
of the motors drifted down, minutes later. Our car- 
riages crawled up a hill strewn with villas hidden in new 
verdure and flowering fruit-trees; and, looking back, 
we had a last view of Belgrade, the White City, on her 
headland, and the Austrian shore. Then we plunged 
into a winding, rutted lane that wandered up beneath 
trees which met overhead — past low, white peasant 
houses roofed with heavy Turkish tiles, and fields 
where women in embroidered leather vests and linen 
skirts tramped the furrows, leading oxen lent by the 
army, and followed by soldiers who guided the wooden 
ploughs. Long strips of homespun linen hung from 
hedge and fence, bleaching in the sun. Except for the 
soldiers, the country was destitute of men. 

We turned inland, along country roads that 
were little more than tracks — now one could not use 
the main road along the Save, for it lay directly under 
the guns of the Austrian trenches, three hundred 
yards away across the river. Many times the driver 
lost the way. We forded rapid mountain streams that 

75 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

washed to the wagon-bed, sank to the hubs in muddy 
sloughs, crept through winding, deep ravines along 
the dried beds of torrents, and rattled down steep 
hills through groves of immense oaks, where droves 
of half-wild pigs fled squealing before the horses. 
Once we passed three huge tombstones taller than a 
man, crowned with the carved turbans that ornament 
the cenotaphs of the hadjis. Immense scimitars were 
chiselled at their base. Johnson asked some peasants 
about them, but they answered "Heroes," and shrugged 
their shoulders. Farther on was a white stone sarcoph- 
agus lying in a hollow of the hill — the Roman tomb 
that once enclosed it had been broken up and carried 
away by the peasants, perhaps centuries ago. Then 
the track led through the middle of an ancient village 
graveyard, its moss-grown Greek crosses leaning 
crazily among dense brush. Everywhere along the 
way new crosses of stone, painted with gold, green, 
and red, stood under little roofs; these, Johnson ex- 
plained, were the memorials of men of the neighbor- 
hood who had died in unknown places and whose 
bodies had never been found. Trees and grass and 
flowers rioted over the hills. Last year's fields were 
jungles of weeds. Houses with doors ajar and gaping 
windows lay amid untended vines. Sometimes we 
bumped down the wide street of a silent country 
village where old men dragged themselves to their 
doors to see us pass, and children romped with wolfish 
sheep-dogs in the dust, and groups of women came 
home from the fields with mattocks on their shoulders. 

76 



ALONG THE BATTLE-LINE 

This was the rackia country — where the native plum 
brandy comes from; immense orchards of prunes and 
plums sweetened the heavy air. 

We stopped at a mehana or village inn to eat the 
lunch we had brought with us — for in all this country 
there was not enough food even for the inhabitants. 
In the dim, cool interior, with its rough wooden tables 
set on the earthen floor, aged peasants with the sim- 
plicity of children took off their hats with grave polite- 
ness. "Dobar dan, gospodine!" they greeted us. 
" Good day, sirs ! We hope your voyage is pleasant." 
The gnarled old proprietor stooped over his earthen 
oven, making Turkish coffee in brass cups and tell- 
ing how the Austrians had come. 

"A soldier with a rifle and a bayonet came through 
this door. 'I want money/ he said; 'all you have — 
quick !' But I answered that I had no money. ' You 
must have money. Are you not an innkeeper?' 
Still I said I had none; then he thrust at me with his 
bayonet — here. You see?" He tremblingly lifted 
his shirt and showed a long gash, yet unhealed. 

"Typhus!" Johnson pointed to the fences be- 
fore the houses on each side of the road. Almost 
every one was marked with a painted white cross, 
sometimes two or three. "Every cross means a case 
of typhus in the house." In half a mile I counted 
more than a hundred. It seemed as if this buoyant, 
fertile land held nothing but death or the memorials 
of death. 

77 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Late in the afternoon we topped a hill and saw 
again the wide-spread Save flooding all its valley, and 
beyond, foothills piling greenly up to the Bosnian 
mountains, range behind range. Here the river made 
a great bend, and half concealed in the middle of a 
wooded plain that seemed entirely under water lay 
red roofs, white swollen towers and thin minarets — 
Obrenovatz. We drove down the hill and joined the 
main road, which rose just above the flood level, 
like a causeway through wastes of water. In the 
marshes on either side sacred white storks were sol- 
emnly fishing. The ground rose a little in a sort of 
island at the centre of the flooded country; we rattled 
along the rocky, unpaved street of a white little Ser- 
bian town, low houses set in clumps of green, with 
double windows to keep out the vampires. 

They led us with much ceremony to the house 
of Gaia Matitch, the postmaster, a nervous, slight 
man with a sweet smile, who welcomed us at his door. 
His wife stood beside him, fluttered, anxious, and 
bursting with the importance of entertaining strangers. 
The entire family waved us before them into their 
bedroom, which they had ornamented with the whitest 
linen, the gayest embroideries, and vases full of flowers 
from the marsh. Two officers from the divisional 
headquarters stood around racking their brains for 
things to make us comfortable; a little girl brought 
plates of apples and preserved plums and candied 
oranges; soldiers fell on their knees and pulled at 
our boots, and another stood by the wash-stand wait- 

78 



ALONG THE BATTLE-LINE 

ing to pour water over our hands; Gaia Matitch him- 
self wandered in and out of the room, a bottle of 
rackia in his hand, offering us a drink, tidying the 
chairs and tables, shouting shrill, exasperated orders 
to the servants. 

"We are greatly honored," he managed to con- 
vey, in a mixture of garbled French, German, and 
English. "In Serbia it is the highest honor for a 
stranger to visit one's house." 

This beautiful Serbian hospitality to foreigners 
we experienced many times. Once, I remember we 
were in a strange town where for weeks no new sup- 
plies had come in, and there was no tobacco. We went 
to a shop to try to find some cigarettes. 

"Cigarettes?" said the shopkeeper, throwing 
up his hands. "Cigarettes are worth double their 
weight in gold." He looked at us for a moment. 
"Are you strangers?" We said we were. Whereupon, 
he unlocked an iron safe and handed us each a pack- 
age of cigarettes. "The charge is nothing," he said: 
"You are foreigners." 

Our friend Matitch, with the tears standing in 
his eyes, pointed to two photographs on the wall — 
one of an old man with a white beard, and the other 
of a young girl. 

"This man is my father," he said. "He was 
seventy-seven years old. When the Austrians took 
Shabatz they sent him to Buda-Pesth as a prisoner 
of war, and he is dead there in Hungary. As for my 
sister here, they took her also — and since August I 

79 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

have heard nothing. I know not whether she is living 
or dead." 

Here we first began to hear of Austrian atrocities 
along the western frontier. We could not believe them 
at first; but later, at Belgrade, at Shabatz, at Losnitza, 
they were repeated again and again, by those who 
escaped, by the families of those who were dead or 
in prison, by sworn statements and the Austrian offi- 
cial fists of prisoners sent to the Serbian Red Cross. 
At the taking of the border towns the Austrians herded 
the civil population together — women, old men, and 
children — and drove them into Austria-Hungary as 
prisoners of war. More than seven hundred were so 
taken from Belgrade, and fifteen hundred from Shabatz 
alone. The official war-prisoner lists of the Austrian 
Government read cynically like this: Ion Touphe- 
chitch, age 84; Darinka Antitch (woman), age 23; 
Georg Georgevitch, age 78; Voyslav Petronievitch, age 
12; Maria Wenz, age 69. The Austrian officers said 
they did this because it was a punitive expedition 
against the Serbs, and not a war ! 

At the mess we heard that we must travel by 
night to Shabatz, for the road led along the river bank 
within range of the enemy's trenches. So after din- 
ner the entire staff accompanied us back to Matitch's. 
Much sour native wine had been flowing, and we went 
arm in arm hooting and singing along the village 
street. When Matitch heard that we were not going 
to spend the night in his house, he almost wept. 

"Please stay!" he cried, grasping our arms. 
80 



ALONG THE BATTLE-LINE 

"Isn't my house good enough for you? Is there any- 
thing you lack?" 

At length, with a sigh he thrust us into the dining- 
room. There we sat, saying farewell, while Matitch 
and Mrs. Matitch brought wine and dried salt beef to 
make us thirsty. A courteous officer inquired from 
Johnson how one drank a health in French; but all 
he could get was "A voire sentir /" which he repeated 
over and over again. We drank Mrs. Matitch's health, 
at which the good woman was furiously embarrassed. 
We sang American songs to uproarious applause. 
Some one stuffed Robinson's pockets full of dried 
beef, which fell out of his clothes for days afterward. 
It got along toward midnight, and we ought to have 
started at ten. Of a sudden Matitch rose to his feet. 
"Pobratim!" he shouted, and all the others echoed 
"Pobratim!" 

"I now make you my pobratim — my blood- 
brother," said he, glowing with friendliness. "It is 
the old Serbian ceremony. Your arm through mine — 
so!" 

One by one we linked elbows and drank thus, 
and then threw our arms about each other's necks, 
and embraced loudly on both cheeks. The company 
roared and pounded on the table. It was done — and 
to this day we are pobratim with Gaia Matitch. 

At length we were in the carriages; the drivers 
snapped their whips, and we were off, to shouts of 
"S Bogom 1 Farewell ! Laku Noch ! Happy night ! " 

There was a bright moon. As we passed the out- 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

skirts of the village, two silent, armed figures on horse- 
back fell in behind the first carriage, riding along with 
us till the danger zone was passed. Now we pitched 
and tossed over rocks or wallowed through deep mud; 
again the horses were splashing in water that rose to 
the hubs, where the river-flood covered the road. 
The drivers cracked their whips no more, nor shouted 
— they cursed the horses in low tones, for we were 
now within hearing of the Austrian trenches. No 
sound was heard except the beat of the horses' hoofs 
and the creaking of the carriage. 

The moon sank slowly. The mounted guards 
vanished as mysteriously as they had come. Still 
we rocked on. Gently the wide, starry sky paled to 
dawn, and eastward, over the great mountains of 
Tser, where the Serbians broke the first invasion, 
came the white and silver dawn. Under a grassy 
hill crowned with an enormous white Greek church 
wrecked by artillery fire, a hundred ox-carts were 
scattered in the fields, their drivers sleeping wrapped 
in blankets of vivid colors, or squatting around early 
fires that painted their faces red. They were bound 
for Belgrade, a week's crawling journey away, to 
bring back food for the starving country where we 
were going. 

Over the mountains leaped the sun, hot and 
blinding, and we rattled into the streets of Shabatz, 
between endless rows of smashed and gutted and 
empty houses, before the town was awake. 

A cafe stood open. We made for it, and ordered 
82 



ALONG THE BATTLE-LINE 

coffee. Was there anything to eat ? We were ravenous. 
The woman shook her head. "In Shabatz there is 
not even bread." 

"Eggs!" we cried. 

Johnson lazily threw up his hands. "My dear 
sairs ! Excuse me. There is no eggs. Thees is war ! " 

"But I saw hens up the street," I insisted. Finally 
Johnson consented to ask the woman. 

"There are no eggs for sale here," she replied. 
"But since the gospodine are strangers, we will give 
you some." 

Shabatz had been a rich and important town, 
metropolis of the wealthiest department in Serbia, 
Machva, and the centre of a great fruit, wine, wool, 
and silk trade. It contained twenty-five hundred 
houses. Some had been destroyed by the guns; twice 
as many more were wantonly burned, and all of them 
had been broken into and looted. One walked along 
miles and miles of streets — every house was gutted. 
The invaders had taken linen, pictures, children's 
playthings, furniture — and what was too heavy or 
cumbersome to move they had wrecked with axes. 
They had stabled their horses in the bedrooms of fine 
houses. In private libraries all the books lay scattered 
in filth on the floor, carefully ripped from their covers. 
Not simply a few houses had been so treated — every 
house. It was a terrible thing to see. 

At the time of the first invasion many people 
remained in Shabatz, trusting that they would be 
safe. But the soldiers were loosed like wild beasts 

83 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

in the city, burning, pillaging, raping. We saw the 
gutted Hotel d'Europe, and the blackened and mu- 
tilated church where three thousand men, women, and 
children were penned up together without food or 
water for four days, and then divided into two groups 
— one sent back to Austria as prisoners of war, the 
other driven ahead of the army as it marched south 
against the Serbians. This is not unsupported rumor 
or hysterical accusation, as it is often in France and 
Belgium; it is a fact proved by a mass of sworn testi- 
mony, by hundreds of people who made that terrible 
march. We talked with several; one a very old woman 
who had been forced at the point of the bayonet 
to go on foot before the troops more than thirty-five 
miles to Valievo. Her shoes had rotted from her 
feet — for ten miles she walked barefoot over the 
stony road. 

In the Prefecture we went over hundreds of re- 
ports, affidavits, and photographs, giving names, 
ages, addresses of the sufferers, and details of the hor- 
rible things the Austrians had done. There was one 
picture taken at the village of Lechnitza, showing 
more than a hundred women and children chained 
together, their heads struck off and lying in a separate 
heap. At Kravitza old men, women, and children 
were tortured and fiendishly outraged, then butchered. 
At Yvremovatz fifty people were herded into a cellar 
and burned alive. Five undefended towns were razed 
to the ground — forty-two villages were sacked, and 
the greater part of their inhabitants massacred. The 

84 



ALONG THE BATTLE-LINE 

typhus, brought into the country by the Austrian 
army, still ran riot through Shabatz and all the region. 
And here there were no doctors nor hospitals. 

To be perfectly fair, let me say that everywhere 
we were told it was the Hungarians, and not the Aus- 
trian Germans, who had committed these atrocities — 
the Hungarians, who have always been enemies of 
the Serbs, in Croatia as well as here. The Austrians 
themselves seem to have behaved fairly well; they 
paid for what they took and did not bother peaceable 
civilians. 

But the Hungarians reverted to their savage 
ancestors, the Huns. When they retreated from 
Shabatz, in December, they gathered together in the 
courtyard of Gachitch's pharmacy three hundred 
Serbian soldiers taken prisoners in battle, shot them 
slowly and then broke their necks. Belgium can 
show no horrors as black as these. . . . The cold- 
blooded fiends who committed them gave as an ex- 
cuse that the townspeople had harbored comitadjis — 
who, they had been told by their officers, were savage 
bandits, to be shot on sight. But in all this region 
there were no comitadjis, nor ever had been. In the 
country they pretended to believe that the Serbian 
peasant costume was the comitadji uniform — and 
since every civilian, man, woman, and child, wore it, 
they butchered them all. The slaughter of the prisoners 
of war had no excuse. 

In this once flourishing and pleasant city hardly 
85 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

two hundred people now lived, camping miserably in 
their ruined houses, without enough to eat. We wan- 
dered in the hot sun through deserted streets, past 
the square where once the great market of all north- 
west Serbia had been held, and the peasants had 
gathered in their bright dress from hundreds of kilo- 
metres of rich mountain valleys and fertile plains. 
It was market-day. A few miserable women in rags 
stood mournfully by their baskets of sickly vege- 
tables. And on the steps of the gutted Prefecture 
sat a young man whose eyes had been stabbed out 
by Hungarian bayonets. He was tall and broad- 
shouldered, with ruddy cheeks — dressed in the dazzling 
homespun linen of the peasant's summer costume, 
and in his hat he wore yellow dandelions. He played 
a melancholy tune upon a horse-headed Serbian fiddle 
and sang: 

"I am sad, for I have lost the sight of the sun 
and the green fields and the blossoming plum-trees. 
God's blessing to you who have given me a grosh 
(four cents) . Blessing to all who are about to give " 

The prefect pointed to the broken buildings. 
"When the war is finished we shall make a new Sha- 
batz," he said. "The government has already ordered 
that no one shall repair the old ruined houses. They 
must be rebuilt entirely new." 



86 



A NATION EXTERMINATED 

NEXT morning we boarded the train of the 
narrow-gauge railroad which taps the richest 
part of the Machva, and connects the valley of the 
Drina with the valley of the Save. Four box-cars fol- 
lowed our carriage, crammed with miserable refugees, 
chiefly women and children — returning to the homes 
from which they had fled, destitute and on foot, six 
months ago, before the Austrian scourge. We went 
slowly along a vast fertile plain, white with fruit or- 
chards in bloom and green with tall grass and new foli- 
age, between uncultivated fields rank with weeds, and 
past white houses blackened with fire. All this coun- 
try had been burned, looted, and its people murdered. 
Not an ox was seen, and for miles not a man. We 
passed through little towns where grass grew in the 
streets and not a single human being lived. Some- 
times the train would halt to let the refugees descend; 
they stood there beside the track, all their possessions 
in sacks over their shoulders, gazing silently at the 
ruins of their homes. . . . 

The prefect came with us, stopping the train 
for an hour or so at different villages, to show us the 
sights. So we visited Prnjavor, once a rich little place 
of three thousand people, now a waste of burned and 
smashed dwellings. At the station was a tall, rugged 

87 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

old farmer in peasant costume of rough brown wool, 
who was introduced to us as Mr. Samourovitch, deputy 
to the Skouptchina. He pointed down into a pool 
of muddy water beside the railroad track, from which 
emerged the top of a heap of earth, crowned with two 
wooden crosses. 

"That is the grave of my old father and mother," 
he said without emotion, "the Swabos shot them for 
comitadjis." We walked on into the town, to a place 
where once a house stood, that now was a black heap 
of ashes and burnt timbers. "In this place," he went 
on, "the Hungarians gathered together a hundred 
citizens of Prnjavor — they could not cram them all 
into the house, so they made the rest stand close and 
bound them to it with ropes — and then they set fire to 
the house, and shot those who tried to escape. . . . 
This long, low pile of dirt is their grave." The story 
seemed too horrible for any possibility, and I made 
particular inquiries about it. But it was literally 
true. Swiss doctors examined the spot and took 
photographs of the bodies before they were buried; 
they were all old people, women, and children. 

Stagnant pools from the recent rains, covered 
with green slime, stood in the streets. A smell of de- 
caying bodies and neglected filth was in the air. Be- 
fore almost every house at least one sinister white 
cross was painted on the fence to show where typhus 
was or had been. In the dooryard of one place, where 
the grass had been dug up to make one huge grave for 
many people, a wrinkled, limping woman stood sur- 



A NATION EXTERMINATED 

rounded by nine children, all under fifteen. Two were 
almost unable to stand, dead-white and shaking from 
some fever; three others, one only a baby, were covered 
with huge running sores and scabs. The woman 
pointed to the grave-mound. 

"I have lost every one but these — there are my 
husband and my sister and my father, and my brother- 
in-law and his wife. And we have nothing fit to feed 
these sick children. The condensed milk that the 
government sends for the children — the president of 
the town gives it only to his political constituents, 
the dishonest Socialist !" 

This woman and her children, living in miserable 
squalor, were all that remained of a powerful zadrouga. 
Two long, one-story white houses, fronting on the street 
where it turned at right angles, embraced a sort of 
patio, carpeted with long grass and wild flowers, and 
shaded by an ancient oak. The entrance to the houses 
was from the garden, and there was another house be- 
hind, with offices, stables, and the rackia distillery, 
where the family made its own plum brandy. Here 
lived three generations, the women with their hus- 
bands, the men with their wives, and each couple 
with its children — not to mention cousins, aunts, 
uncles — more than forty people in all, who shared 
their land and all their property in common. The 
buildings were wrecked and burned; of the people, 
some had died in battle, others had been murdered 
by the Hungarians, and the typhus had done the 
rest. 

89 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"They did terrible things," said old Samouro- 
vitch as we walked back to the train. "We are happy 
that we paid the Austrians for all this by beating 
them so badly in December." This extraordinary 
lack of bitterness we found everywhere in Serbia; 
the people seemed to think that the smashing Aus- 
trian defeat revenged them for all those black enor- 
mities, for the murder of their brothers, for the bring- 
ing of the typhus. 

Through meadows gorgeous with purple larkspur 
and buttercups, through orchards heavy with peach, 
apple, cherry, and plum blossoms we went; here the 
Turkish influence entirely died out, and the mud 
houses became entirely Serb — capped no longer with 
red tiles, but with peaked roofs of rough wooden 
shingles. Then appeared once more over the westward 
plain the green Bosnian mountains, and we were at 
Losnitza — again under the Austrian guns across the 
Drina. 

There was a typhus hospital, which we visited. 
It had once been a school. As the Serbian doctor 
opened the doors of room after room, a sickening 
stench of dirt, filthy clothing and airlessness came 
out. The windows were all closed. The sick — mostly 
soldiers in the wreck of their uncleaned uniforms — 
lay packed closely shoulder to shoulder upon foul 
straw spread on the floor. There was no sign of dis- 
infectant. Some leaned weakly on their elbows, 
scratching feebly for vermin; others tossed and chat- 

90 



A NATION EXTERMINATED 

tered in delirium, and others lay whitely still, their 
eyes half open, like the dead. 

"It gets better every day," said the doctor, rub- 
bing his hands. "Two weeks ago we had four hun- 
dred here — now there are only eighty-six. ..." He 
glanced meditatively at the sick men, jammed so 
close together that they almost lay upon one another. 
"Then we were crowded." 

At dusk we sat at a cafe table in the great square 
of Losnitza, drinking Turkish coffee and eating black 
bread and kaymak — delicious yellow cheese-butter. 
In the dim evening light oxen knelt by their carts, 
and peasants all in white linen stood in bright groups, 
talking. From ten different doors of drinking-shops 
about the immense space, floods of yellow light poured, 
and there came bursts of violin music and singing. 
We got up and strolled over to one; the proprietress, 
a scrawny woman with yellow hair, caught sight of 
us, and raised a shrill yell: "Why do you stand there 
in the street? Why do you not come here and sit at 
my tables? I have all sorts of good wine, beer, and 
koniak /" We meekly obeyed. 

"We are Americans," I explained as best I could, 
"and we do not know your language." 

"That's no reason why you can't drink!" she 
cried brazenly, and slapped me on the back. "I 
don't care what language you drink in !" 

Inside two gypsies were playing, one a fiddle 
and the other a cornet, while an old peasant, his head 

9i 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

thrown back, intoned through his nose the ballad of 
the Bombardment of Belgrade: 

The Bombardment of Belgrade 

"A dream had Madame Georgina, 
The faithful spouse of Nicola Pachitch 
The well-known Serbian prime minister; 
In her palace in the centre of Belgrade 
She had a dream, and this was her dream: 

"Northward the earth trembles — 
Trembled Srem, Batchka and Hungary — 
And a terrible darkness 
Rolls south upon Belgrade, 
The White City that rides the waters. 
Athwart the gloom Hghtnings cross, 
And thunder follows after, 
Smiting the houses and the palaces, 
Wrecking the villas and hotels 
And the fine shops of Belgrade. 
From the Save and the Danube 
Soar the roaring water-dragons — 
Spitting thunder and lightnings 
Over Belgrade, the White City; 
Blasting houses and streets, 
Reducing to ruin hotels and palaces, 
Smashing the wooden pavements, 
Burning the pretty shops, 
And upsetting churches and chapels; 
Everywhere the screams of children and invalids — 
Everywhere the cries of old women and old men ! 
As if the last terrible Day of Judgment 
Broke over Belgrade ! 

"Then in the night Madame Georgina awoke, 
Asking herself what had happened, 

92 



A NATION EXTERMINATED 

And began to weep, 

For she knew not how to interpret her dream. 

Then awoke Nicola Pachitch also 

And addressed his faithful spouse: 

What is the matter with thee, faithful spouse, 
That thou risest in the night 
And wettest thy cheek with tears? 
Of what art thou frightened? 
Tell it me, my faithful spouse, 
Whom God bless ! ' 

" Then spoke Madame Pachitch: 

" ' My master ! Pachitch, Nicola ! 
This night have I had a terrible dream. 
I have dreamed, and in my dream have seen many things, 
But I cannot interpret them, 
Therefore am I miserable and worried.' 
And she began to tell her dream. . . ." 

(Three hundred lines more, consisting mostly 
of accurate prophecy by Mr. Pachitch on what ac- 
tually occurred.) 

Over the sharp, crumpled house roofs westward 
the swollen cupola of a Greek church rose black against 
the warm yellow sky. And there were great trees, 
spread like lace across the firmament, where already 
faint stars glittered. A thin crescent moon floated 
up over the shadowy Bosnian mountains, the heart 
and birthplace of Serbian song — dear land so long an 
exile. . . . 



93 



GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES 

BEFORE dawn next morning we were on horse- 
back, galloping out of Losnitza on the way to 
Goutchevo Mountain, which towered in a lofty series 
of wooded crests three thousand feet up to the south. 
It was the summit of Goutchevo that the Austrians 
seized and intrenched at the time of the second in- 
vasion. In the face of their withering fire the Ser- 
bians climbed its eastern side, foot by foot, until their 
trenches were also upon the narrow crest, and along 
a front of ten miles on top of a savage mountain was 
fought that strange Battle Above the Clouds which 
lasted fifty-four days, and ended with the retirement 
of the Serbs, only because the third invasion had 
broken their lines down by Krupaign. After the 
rout at Valievo the Austrians abandoned Goutchevo 
without a stand. 

The genial young captain who escorted us had 
once been a comitadji officer, sent by the government 
to organize revolt — first in Macedonia, and then in 
Austrian Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

"Before we volunteered for comitadji service," 
he said, "we were sent to the universities in Berlin 
and Vienna to study the organization of revolutions, 
particularly of the Italian Risorgimento. ..." 

Our road turned to rough country way, deep in 
94 



GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES 

mud, then to a mere track where only mules and 
pedestrians could pass — winding upward through im- 
mense oaks and ashes, lost in swift mountain brooks 
and choked with brush. An hour's hard climb brought 
us to the summit of the first mountain, from which 
we could see the precipitous peak of Eminove Vode — 
"Waters of Emin," as the old Turks named it — 
rising tremendous from the little valley that lay be- 
tween, and splendid with the vivid green of young 
leaves, and great shining knobs of black rock. 

In the high valley of the hills the white houses 
of a village lay half hidden in a sea of riotous plum 
blossoms. Their windows gaped wide — their doors 
swung idly to and fro. Behind some wall which we 
could not see a feminine voice was wailing shrilly, 
flatly, with hysterical catches, the monotonous song 
of mourning for the dead. The captain pulled up his 
horse and hallooed loudly — finally a thin, gaunt woman 
came slowly through the orchard. 

"Have you rackia, sister?" 

"Ima. I have." She went back and returned 
with a stone jug and a long-necked vase for us to 
drink from. 

"What is this place?" 

"It is the Rich Village of the Rackia-Makers." 

"Where are all the people?" 

"They are dead, of the spotted heat (typhus)." 

We spurred forward through the golden silence, 
heavy with the scent of the plum-trees and with hum- 
ming bees. The wailing died behind. Here the trav- 

95 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

elled road ended, and beyond was a mountain path 
untra veiled save by hunters and the goatherds of high 
Goutchevo, but now scarred and rutted by the feet 
of thousands, and the passage of heavy bodies dragged 
through the rocks and brush. 

"By here the army climbed Goutchevo," said 
the captain, "and those marks are the marks of cannon 
that we took up there." He pointed to the towering 
height of Eminove Vode. "Horses were no good 
here — and the oxen fell dead of fatigue. So we pulled 
them up by men — a hundred and twenty to each 
gun." 

The path wound upward along the flank of the 
mountain and through a leaping stream which we 
waded. Here it ceased; but on the other side the 
deeply scored hillside rose almost straight for five 
hundred feet. We dismounted and led the stumbling, 
winded mountain horses, zigzagging from shelf to shelf 
of earth and crumbling rock. 

"It took them three days to haul the cannon up 
here," panted the captain. 

Resting and walking, and for level spaces riding 
a short distance, we climbed up through the forest 
of the mounting crest perhaps a thousand feet higher, 
over ground strewn with brass cartridge-shells, trace- 
leathers, bits of Serbian uniforms, and the wheels of 
shattered cannon limbers. Everywhere in the woods 
were deserted huts thatched with leaves and the 
branches of trees, and caves in the ground, where 
the Serbian army had lived for two months in the 

96 




?:<-<,.': .•<*,-r&.-'< u< 



THE WOMAN OF GOUTCHEVO MOUNTAIN. 



GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES 

snow. Higher up we noticed that the lower parts of 
the trees were covered with leaves, but that their 
tops were as if dead; slowly as we climbed the dead 
part descended, until half the forest lifted gaunt, 
broken spikes where the vicious hail of bullets had 
torn off their tops — and then came trees naked of 
branches. We crossed two lines of deep trenches, 
and emerged on the bare summit of Goutchevo, which 
had also, once been wooded, but where now nothing 
but jagged stumps studded with glistening lead re- 
mained. 

On one side of this open space were the Serbian 
trenches, on the other side the Austrian. Barely 
twenty yards separated the two. Here and there 
both trenches merged into immense pits, forty feet 
around and fifty feet deep, where the enemy had 
undermined and dynamited them. The ground be- 
tween was humped into irregular piles of earth. Look- 
ing closer, we saw a ghastly thing: from these little 
mounds protruded pieces of uniform, skulls with 
draggled hair, upon which shreds of flesh still hung; 
white bones with rotting hands at the end, bloody 
bones sticking from boots such as the soldiers wear. 
An awful smell hung over the place. Bands of half- 
wild dogs slunk at the edge of the forest, and far away 
we could see two tearing at something that lay half- 
covered on the ground. Without a word the captain 
pulled out his revolver and shot. One dog staggered 
and fell thrashing, then lay still — the other fled howl- 
ing into the trees; and instantly from the depths of 

97 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the wooji all around came a wolfish, eerie howling in 
answer, dying away along the edge of the battle-field 
for miles. 

We walked on the dead, so thick were they — 
sometimes our feet sank through into pits of rotting 
flesh, crunching bones. Little holes opened suddenly, 
leading deep down and swarming with gray mag- 
gots. Most of the bodies were covered only with a 
film of earth, partly washed away by the rain — many 
were not buried at all. Piles of Austrians lay as they 
had fallen in desperate charge, heaped along the 
ground in attitudes of terrible action. Serbians were 
among them. In one place the half-eaten skeletons 
of an Austrian and a Serbian were entangled, their 
arms and legs wrapped about each other in a death- 
grip that could not even now be loosened. Behind 
the front line of Austrian trenches was a barbed-wire 
barricade, significant of the spirit of the men pinned 
in that death-trap — for they were mostly Serbians 
from the Austrian Slav provinces, driven at the point 
of a revolver to fight their brothers. 

For six miles along the top of Goutchevo the 
dead were heaped like that — ten thousand of them, 
said the captain. From here we could see for forty 
miles around — the green mountains of Bosnia across 
the silver Drina, little white villages and flat roads, 
planes of fields green and yellow with new crops and 
brown with ploughing, and the towers and bright 
houses of Austrian Svornik, gleaming among lovely 
trees at the bend of the river; southward in long lines 

98 



GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES 

that seemed to move, so living were they, lifted and 
broke the farther peaks of Goutchevo, along which 
wriggled to the end of vision the double line of trenches 
and the sinister field between. . . 

We rode through fruit orchards heavy with blos- 
soms, between great forests of oaks and beeches and 
blooming chestnuts; under high wooded hills, whose 
slopes broke into a hundred rippling mountain meadows 
that caught the sun like silk. Everywhere springs 
poured from the hollows, and clear streams leaped 
down canyons choked with verdure, from Goutchevo, 
which the Turks called "Mountain of Waters" — 
from Goutchevo, saturated with the rotting dead. 
All this part of Serbia was watered by the springs of 
Goutchevo; and on the other side they flowed into 
the Drina, thence into the Save and the Danube, 
through lands where millions of people drank and 
washed and fished in them. To the Black Sea flowed 
the poison of Goutchevo. . . . 

Late in the afternoon we descended into the main 
highroad to Valievo, by which the Austrian army 
had entered the heart of the country, and at evening, 
clattered down the main street of the white little 
village of Krupaign, where the subprefect, the chief 
of police, the president of the town, and the ofiicers 
of the divisional staff came to meet us, dressed in 
their best uniforms. Our dinner consisted of roast 
young pig torn in fragments, beer, wine, rackia, cognac, 
and pitta smesson, chopped meat fried in greasy pastry. 

99 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Through the warm dark of the spring evening 
came the squealing of bagpipes, the stamping and 
shuffling of feet, and short, wild shouts. We leaned 
from the window. Up the cobbled street marched a 
big gypsy with the Serbian pipes swelling under his 
arm, and behind him came hundreds of soldiers, hand 
in hand, sidling along in a sort of rough polka step — 
the kolo, which is danced all over this part of the 
world. They swayed along, whooping, until they 
reached the village square; there they formed a huge, 
irregular circle, with the gypsy in the middle. The 
tune changed to a swifter, wilder measure. The 
dancers flung their legs high and leaped faster in all 
sorts of variations — each one the specialty of a dif- 
ferent village — and as they danced they sang a short 
chorus with much laughter. 

"Every Sunday the peasants all over Serbia gather 
in their village squares and dance the kolo" explained 
the captain. "There are kolos for marriages, kolos for 
christenings, kolos for every occasion. And each polit- 
ical party has a separate kolo for elections. This one 
they are dancing now is the Radical kolo (the govern- 
ment in power) — and the song they are singing is the 
Radical song: 

" 'If you will pay my taxes for me 
Then I will vote for you ! . . . ''"■ 

At a quarter to five in the morning our breakfast 
appeared — a glass of cognac, a glass of tea, and a tiny 
cup of Turkish coffee. This was to last us perhaps 

IOO 




HIT BY A BURSTING SHELL. 



GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES 

all day, for between here and Valievo was all dev- 
astated country. At five we climbed into an ox- 
cart covered over with a bowed top of matting like 
the roof of a prairie-schooner, so low that we could 
not sit up straight. The wagon was not only spring- 
less, but built so that every unevenness was magnified 
one hundred times and communicated to every part. 
And our route lay over the worst road in Serbia, now 
rendered impassable by the double passage of two great 
armies in the winter. The greater part of the trip con- 
sisted of a jolting crawl over huge bowlders lying in 
bottomless mud — and eighty kilometres lie between 
Krupaign and Valievo. 

"Haide!" roared the driver, lashing the horses. 
He was a miserably dressed soldier, dirty and covered 
with fleas — who soon were holding a banquet on 
Robinson and me. We tore down the cobbled street 
at a terrible pace, bouncing up to the roof with shaking 
bones, in the frightful clatter of the cart over the 
rocks. 

"See those horses go !" cried the soldier, beaming 
with pride. "The finest horses in all Serbia! This 
stallion I have named Voyvoda Michitch, and the 
mare, I call her King Peter." 

He pulled up with a flourish at the last cafe in 
the village, got down and sat down at a table, rapping 
loudly for a glass of wine. And there he stayed for 
half an hour, embracing the hostess, patting the chil- 
dren on the head, and sipping his wine amid an ad- 
miring circle of girls who greeted his sallies with 

IOI 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

giggles. Finally we fell furiously upon Johnson, de- 
manding that he call the driver. 

"Excuse me, sair!" returned our guide. "You 
must have patience. Thees is war !" 

Off again at top speed, bouncing over the stones 
and sinking in the mud. 

"I am behind time!" explained the driver. "We 
must hurry ! " 

"Well, why did you stay at that cafe so long?" 

He stared at us with bland surprise. "Because 
I wanted to talk and drink ! " 

Finally the horses were too tired to run, and the 
road became so horrible that we walked, the drivers 
pulling at the bridles with shouts, and lashing their 
beasts through mire and over heaps of great stones. 

All along the debris of the Austrian retreat still 
littered both sides of the way — hundreds of trans- 
port wagons, cannon limbers, broken guns, heaps of 
rusty rifles and of unshot cartridges, uniforms, caps, 
hairy knapsacks, and leather ammunition-belts. The 
road ran along the edge of a canyon through which 
a river fell down the valley. A sickening stench rose 
from it. Into this river had been thrown the bodies 
of men and horses found dead along the line of the 
retreat. Here the river widened out and poured 
thunderously over an immense dam; and looking down, 
we could see the clear water running above a mass of 
sodden cloth and bodies bloated gray — from the falls 
themselves a bone stuck straight out, with strings of 
flesh and pieces of clothing waving in the current. 

102 



GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES 

This nightmare journey continued for five hours, 
until we reached the hideous, ruined, looted village of 
Zavlaka. Faint with hunger, we besought Johnson 
to get something to eat. He roused himself from a 
light slumber and began: "Excuse me, sair! Thees 
is " 

"I don't care whether it's war or not!" screamed 
Robinson. "You get out and rustle some eggs! 
Haider' 

We got our eggs and again started. All that day 
we crawled down the valley, which is nothing but a 
fifty-mile grave of dead Austrians. 

Late at night we rounded a wooded hill where 
the camp-fires of the first army stretched under im- 
mense oak-trees for miles, and the soldiers lay about 
them singing epics of the war, and found ourselves 
in the streets of Valievo. 

Valievo had been one of the worst typhus pest- 
holes in all Serbia. Even now, when the disease had 
diminished so greatly, the streets of Valievo were 
nothing but avenues of hospitals. We were taken to 
one of these. 

"Now," said the Serbian doctor who was in 
charge, "you shall see a good Serbian hospital. You 
have seen the bad ones, where we were hampered by 
the lack of all necessities. But my hospital is equal 
to the American hospital at Belgrade." 

We entered a whitewashed hall, clean as it could 
be made, and smelling of disinfectant. In the wards, 
where the patients had each his own bed and lay 

103 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

in clean blankets in new clean nightclothes, all the 
windows were open to the sun and air. The doctor 
put on a white blouse over his uniform, washed his 
hands with sublimate, and made us do the same. We 
were enchanted. But in the centre of the hospital 
was an open-air court, whitewashed with lime, where 
the convalescents walked slowly about. At one side 
was a small open shed, and within lay five dead men, 
clothed in the filthy rags in which they had entered 
the hospital. They had lain there for two days, for 
Serbians will not bury a man until a coffin is made — 
and in Valievo the coffin-makers were behind with 
their orders. On the other side of the court were the 
open toilets. And the court sloped down to the middle, 
where was the well for drinking water! 

Here was a horrible room full of men with post- 
typhus gangrene, that awful disease that follows 
typhus in almost fifty per cent of soldier cases, in 
which the flesh rots away and the bones crumble. 
The only hope of stopping it is by amputating the 
afflicted part — and this room was full of men without 
arms and legs, of men with rotting faces and breasts. 
They moaned and screamed, crying, "Kuku Mayka! 
Holy Mother, help me!" For most of them there 
was nothing to be done. Their flesh would slough 
away until it reached their hearts or brains, and death 
would come in dreadful agony. 

We wandered around Valievo for two days, 
noting the sanitary measures that had been taken 

to stop the epidemic. They consisted largely in 

104 







£i. ; y 




Iff ^M> 

r i 



'HOW IS IT WITH THEE, O SERBIA, MY DEAR MOTHER?' 



GOUTCHEVO AND THE VALLEY OF CORPSES 

throwing disinfectant over everything. In the street 
and in every courtyard were piles of filth and garbage. 
Little attempt had been made to remove these; there 
were even new piles on top of the old — but freshly 
sprinkled with lime. This is the key to the Serbian 
attitude toward sanitation. They do not understand 
it — they haven't the slightest conception what it 
means. It is something modern, something European, 
something that the civilized world uses to prevent 
disease; so they splash disinfectant about, with a 
half-contemptuous sneer at people who are so cowardly 
as to take such precautions, and go on accumulating 
filth as they always have done. 

We went down to the railway-station late at 
night, to take the train for Nish and Russia. In the 
light of blue electric arcs, long chains of Austrian 
prisoners were unloading flour to feed the desolate 
country until the harvests could be sown and gathered. 
And as we waited on the platform, I thought with 
wonder of these Serbians, their origin, and their des- 
tiny. They alone of all the Balkan peoples have been 
one unmixed race since first they came into this coun- 
try eight centuries ago — and they alone have built 
their own civilization, unmodified by any other. The 
Romans had a string of mountain fortresses through 
the region — they settled no colonies here. The Cru- 
saders passed them by. They held their narrow passes 
against the Tartars of Bulgaria, the Dacians of Ru- 
mania, the Huns and Tcheks of the North — and long 

105 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

before their neighbors, with the armed help of Euro- 
pean nations, threw off the yoke of the Turk, Serbia 
made herself free. When Europe imposed foreign dy- 
nasties on Bulgaria, Rumania, and Greece, Serbia was 
ruled by her own house. With such a stock, with such 
a history, with the imperialistic impulse growing daily, 
hourly, in the hearts of her peasant soldiers, into what 
tremendous conflicts will Serbia's ambition lead her ! 

There was a soldier standing on guard at the 
platform — a tall, wiry, bearded man, dressed in the 
fragments of a uniform and shoes with sandals of cow- 
hide and high socks embroidered with flowers. He 
was leaning on an Austrian rifle, staring out over the 
heads of the sweating workmen to those dim moun- 
tains lost in the dark beyond. And as he looked he 
sang, swaying lightly to the rhythm, that most an- 
cient Serbian ballad of all, which begins: 

" How is it with thee, O Serbia, my dear mother ? " 



xo6 



Ill 

RUSSIA 



RUSSIA'S BACK DOOR 

AT the end of May the Russian army, to the as- 
JLjl tonishment of the world, had covered more than 
two hundred miles on its stupendous retreat from 
the Carpathians. In Bucovina it abandoned Czerno- 
witz before the formidable Austrian drive, and with- 
drew behind the River Pruth. We decided to cross 
the frontier where Rumanian Moldavia, Austrian 
Bucovina, and Russian Bessarabia meet at the bend 
of the river, and try to strike the Russian front in 
action. 

From Dorohoi, the northern terminus of the 
Rumanian railway, it is twenty miles over the hills 
to the frontier. We bargained for a four-horse coach; 
but the chief of police of Dorohoi smiled and shook 
his head. 

"You cannot pass the frontier without per- 
mission from the high authorities," he said; "the 
Rumanian custom-house is closed." He looked us 
over thoughtfully. "However, I am going across to 
Russia myself to-night, and you can come with me 
in my automobile if you like. I will introduce you 
to the commandant of Novo Sielitza, which is the 
headquarters of the Third Army. ... He is a close 
friend of mine — I often visit him. The Russians are 
hospitable people. By the way, they will be grateful 

109 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

to you over there if you bring a little something al- 
coholic " 

Joyously we sallied forth and bought cognac and 
dismissed our coach. And just as gray evening flooded 
the world after a day of rain, and the clouds rolled 
back like curtains, piling up to golden pinnacles in a 
shallow green sky, our machine roared out from the 
dripping forest of Hertza, and we could see beyond 
the white walls and thatched roofs of a little village 
the rolling miles of hills, emerald with wheat glittering 
wetly, black with forests, smoking with the sweat of 
fat earth after rain; and farther still, to the left, the 
rolling green and gold and brown country of Bucovina 
— to the right, the plain beyond the Pruth, low hills 
and higher hills behind — Russian Bessarabia. On 
the Austrian side, far away, were visible white wind- 
ing roads, dazzling villas set in green, an occasional 
shining town — order and prosperity; on the Russian 
side, the wet tin roofs of a clump of wooden shacks, 
thatched huts the color of dirt, a wandering muddy 
track which served as a road — the very reverse. In 
all the vast landscape nothing moved, except a mys- 
terious black smoke slowly rising from behind the 
hill, which is Czernowitz, and steam from a whistling 
train at Novo Sielitza. But the air trembled with 
deep, lazy sound — the cannon firing somewhere be- 
yond vision along the Pruth. 

Just ahead the river itself came in view between 
hills, here and there, shining dully like old brass. We 
swooped down with screaming siren through the vil- 

IIO 



RUSSIA'S BACK DOOR 

lage of Hertza, where the peasants, clad in white linen 
all embroidered with flowers, were gathered on the 
green for their evening songs and dances and lifted 
their broad-brimmed hats to us — down, through vine- 
yards and corn-fields, to Mamornitza on the bank of 
the muddy river. 

Over all the west the sunset made a fierce flame, 
edging the toppling clouds with fire, pouring green 
gold over the fields. The radiance faded; by the 
time we reached the riverside it was quite dark, 
except for a broad red band low down in the northern 
sky. Against this reared a tumble-down shed set in 
a barren waste of sand, stones, and mud — where the 
Pruth roared in the spring floods. But it was Rus- 
sia, Holy Russia — sombre, magnificent, immense, in- 
coherent, unknown even to herself. 

They had been notified at the deserted custom- 
house, and in a room musty with long neglect a shabby 
little man visaed our passports. Escorted by two sol- 
diers, we picked our way down to the river, where a 
flat-bottomed scow lay half full of water, and a rope 
fastened to the bank stretched out into the darkness 
— to Russia! We couldn't see the other side, but as 
we swung out into the brown current, the Rumanian 
shore glided astern and disappeared; for a moment 
we were adrift on a boundless sea, and then against 
the dim, red sky something rose and loomed — a giant 
soldier with a long-bayonetted rifle, the crown of his hat 
peaked up in front as only Russians wear it. Beside 
him was the shadowy form of a two-horsed carriage. 

in 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Without a word the sentry put our baggage into 
the carriage and we followed. He leaped to the box 
— we were off through deep sand, whip cracking. . . ; 
A sudden guttural hail from the dark, and another 
huge soldier bulked in the night beside the carriage. 
Our sentry handed him a slip of paper, which he pre- 
tended to read, holding it upside down — although it 
was now quite dark and he quite illiterate. 

"Koracho! Good!" he grunted and waved us 
on. "PajaVstT 

The last red light had faded from the sky, and 
we rattled through a starless gloom troubled with 
the confused sounds of an army at rest. Far away 
on our right accordions jiggled flatly, and a mighty 
chorus of deep voices swelled in a slow, stern song. 

To the left suddenly opened a meadow bright 
with many fires. Horses were picketed all about — ■ 
in one corner two stallions strained, screaming, at their 
ropes. High saddles, sleeping-rugs of rich color, brass 
samovars lay on the ground, and on the flames copper 
pots smoked. In little knots at the fires, flat-faced, 
swarthy men squatted, Eastern fashion, between their 
knees — men with Chinese eyes and cheek-bones polished 
like teak, robed in long caftans and crowned with 
towering shaggy hats of fur. The twanging, indolent 
sound of their speech reached us. One stood upright 
in the firelight, which gleamed on the silver bosses 
of his belt and the long curved yataghan inlaid with 
gold that hung by his side. 

" Turkmiene" explained the soldier on the box. 
112 



RUSSIA'S BACK DOOR 

Turcomans from beyond the Caspian, from the 
steppes of Asia — the boiling geyser that deluged Eu- 
rope with the great Mongolian invasions — the mys- 
terious cradle of humankind. The fathers of these 
warriors followed Ghenghis Khan and Tamerlane and 
Attila. Their cousins were Sultans in Constantinople, 
and sat upon the Dragon Throne in Peking. One 
glimpse we had of them, a tiny handful in the mighty 
hordes that Russia is pouring down on the West — and 
then we were among the ruins of Austrian Nova 
Sielitza, the old frontier. 

Here the gaping windows of roofless houses, 
walls charred and toppling, immense customs ware- 
houses crumpled with fire. The Russians had wrecked 
everything at the beginning of the war — what became 
of the people we didn't like to think. A big stucco 
hotel had been struck by a bursting shell; light shone 
from within, and big-booted soldiers in blouses stood 
silhouetted in the doorways. The road we drove on 
was white and smooth. Shadowy horsemen jingled 
past, stray light catching the guardless hilts of Cossack 
swords. Gleaming white linen in the gloom marked 
Moldavian peasants shuffling along, laughing and 
speaking gently their Italianate dialect. 

A bridge with another sentry, who waved us by 
when he saw the flash of white paper — now we were 
in Russian Novo Sielitza. Here there was no de- 
struction; but instead of a hard road, we rocked 
through a wide expanse of muddy pools and dried 
ruts, scored with a thousand tracks. At each side of 

"3 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

this street was a deep ditch for drainage and sewage, 
spanned by wooden foot-bridges. Wide, sprawling 
wooden houses alternated with blocks of tiny Jewish 
shops, swarming with squealing, whining, bargaining 
people, and emitting that stale stench that we know 
on New York's lower East Side. Old Jews in long 
overcoats, derby hats resting on their ears, scraggly 
beards, elbows and hands gesticulating — the comedy 
Jew in a burlesque show — filthy babies crawling in 
the lamplight, rows of women in Mother Hubbards and 
brown wigs, nursing their babies and gossiping shrill 
Yiddish on the door-step. 

We swung into a side street, black as pitch, lined 
on either side by long wooden houses behind picket 
fences. 

"Here we are," said our guide. "Now you will 
see a real Russian house and family." 

The door popped open and a stout, bearded officer 
stood on the threshold holding a lamp over his head 
— Captain Vladimir Constantinovitch Madji, com- 
mandant of Novo Sielitza. Behind was a bristling 
bald-headed man with fierce white mustache and 
goatee, and over his shoulder appeared a grinning 
face like the face of a very fat little boy, smoking a 
cigarette, a white silk kerchief wound tightly around 
its forehead. 

"Please! Please! Povtim!" said the captain in 
Rumanian, making gestures of welcome. "Pajal'sfl" 
cried the others in Russian. 

The chief of police explained that he had brought 
114 



RUSSIA'S BACK DOOR 

two friends, Amerikanska; they burst forth into an- 
other delighted chorus of "Povtim! PajaVst'' !" and 
pushed out to look at us, talking rapid Russian. 

"They speak neither Russian nor Rumanian. 
Only French " 

"Entrez!" said the captain, with an elementary 
accent; then in just as amateurish German: "Kommen 
Sie herein, meine H err en!" 

"Voila! Comment! Comment! Voila!" the 
bald-headed man roared. 

" It is all my brother knows of French ! " ex- 
plained Madji, as we entered. The fat face turned 
out to belong to a girl of astonishing corpulence and 
terrific exuberance. Puffing furiously at her cigarette, 
she squeezed both our hands, grasped the lapels of 
our coats and shook us, shouting Russian remarks, 
and laughing uproariously when we didn't under- 
stand. 

The captain radiated hospitality. "Alexandra 
Alexandrovna, get the samovar!" 

She ran off, bellowing orders to invisible servants. 
' ' Antonina Feodorovna ! Prinissitie samovar ou ! ' ' And 
in a moment she was back with a new yellow kerchief 
around her head, a new cigarette, puffing clouds of 
smoke. 

Madji indicated her with his hand. u Mon mart ! 
My husband !" he said in his bad French. 

His brother pranced up like a little old stallion, 
also pointing to her; he repeated "My husband!" 
adding in a fierce voice: "Tres jolie! Tres jolie ! 

"5 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Tres jolie / " He said " tres jolie" over and over again, 
delighted at remembering another French phrase. . . . 

As to the fat girl, we never did discover whose 
"husband" she was. . ... And there was also Alex- 
andra Antonovna, a solemn little girl of about thirteen 
with the sophisticated eyes of a grown woman, like 
all Russian little girls; her status in the household 
remained a mystery, too. Anyway, it wasn't of the 
least importance, for this was Russia, where such 
things don't matter. . . . 

In the dining-room we began by drinking glass 
after glass of tea. Boxes of cigarettes overflowed on 
the table. At one end sat Alexandra Alexandrovna, 
lighting one cigarette from another, shaking with 
laughter and shouting at anybody and everybody. 
At the other end was the old man, beaming upon us 
and crying: "Voila! Comment! Tres jolie!" An- 
tonina the servant shuffled in and out, taking part 
in the general conversation, arguing every order, 
bringing fresh water for the samovar — on terms of 
perfect equality. 

Robinson explained to the old man that he looked 
exactly like Gogol's Cossack hero, Taras Bulba. He 
was delighted. And from that time on we never ad- 
dressed him except as "General Taras Bulba." 

From time to time other officers dropped in — 
men in belted Russian blouses buttoned up the neck, 
their hair cropped close. They kissed Alexandra's 
hand, and made the rounds of the table, murmuring 
their names. Most of them spoke some French or 

116 



RUSSIA'S BACK DOOR 

German, and all were astonishingly frank about the 
situation. 

"Yes, we are falling back like the devil. It is 
mostly because we lack munitions; but there are 
other things. Graft — disorganization " 

A lieutenant broke in: "Do you know the story 

about Colonel B ? He had a bad record in the 

Japanese War, but when this one broke out he was 
appointed chief of staff to General Ivanov. It was 
he who forced the beginning of the retreat from the 
Carpathians; when Ivanov was absent he ordered 
the retreat of an entire army corps — exposing the 
flank of the next army. There wasn't any reason for 
it. People say he is insane. . . . However, the 
thing was hushed up, and he became chief of staff 
to General Dimitriev and did the same thing over 
again ! You'd think that would finish him ? Ah, no ! 
He had powerful friends in Petrograd — and now he is 
chief of staff to another general !" 

Said another calmly: "It is like that. Advance, 
retreat. Advance, retreat. If we retreat now — why, 
then, we shall advance again." 

"But how long will the war last?" 

"What do we care how long it lasts?" remarked 
a second captain with a grin: "What do we care — 
so long as England gives money and the earth gives 
men?" 

At about ten o'clock Alexandra suddenly decided 
to dine. She and Antonina set the table, while Taras 
Bulba bustled about, giving contradictory orders. For 

117 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

zakouska there were plates of sardines, smoked and 
raw herrings, tunny, caviar, sausage, shirred eggs, and 
pickles — to sharpen the appetite — washed down with 
seven different kinds of liquor: cognac, benedictine, 
kummel, raspberry and plum brandies, and Kiev and 
Bessarabian wines. Afterward came great platters 
of corn-meal polenta, then chunks of pork and potatoes. 
We were twelve. The company began dinner with 
wine-glasses full of cognac followed by the others in 
rotation, and finished with several cups of Turkish 
coffee and the seven different liquors all over again. 
Then the samovar was brought, and we settled down 
to the eternal chai. It was midnight. 

"Ah," cried an officer, "if we only had vodka 
now!" 

"Is it really forbidden in Russia?" 

"Except in the first-class restaurants of the big 
cities — Kiev, Odessa, Moscow. You can also get for- 
eign drinks. But they are very expensive. . . . You 
see, the object of the ukase was to keep alcohol from 
the lower classes; the rich can still get it. . . ." 

A young fellow named Amethystov, lieutenant in 
a Crimean Tartar regiment, asked us if we had heard 
the story of the Bismarck Denkmal. 

"It was during the retreat from East Prussia, 
after Tannenberg," he said, a gentle smile lighting his 
blank, fanatical face, "and my regiment was at Johan- 
nisberg, where there was a bronze statue of Bismarck 
about twelve feet tall — like hundreds all over Ger- 
many. My Tartars wanted to pull it down and take 

v 118 




A SON OF GHENGHIS KHAN, TURCOMAN. 



RUSSIA'S BACK DOOR 

it with them as a trophy, but the general absolutely- 
refused to allow it. 'It would cause an international 
incident/ said he. As if the war weren't enough of an 
international incident! Well, so we stole it — pulled 
it down at night, stood it upright in a field furnace, 
and covered it over with a tarpaulin. But we couldn't 
hide the great bronze feet sticking out at the bottom. 
.... We got it as far as Tilsit — and one day the 
general came riding along the line, and saw the feet! 

"'Who took that thing?' he shouts. Oh, how 
mad he was ! ' In the morning I'll find out the guilty 
ones, if I have to court-martial the entire regiment! 
It must be abandoned here — do you understand me ? ' 

"Of course, he had a right to be angry, because 
we were using four army horses to pull the thing, and 
we'd had to abandon a lot of baggage because trans- 
port was lacking. . . . 

"So that night we took Bismarck out of his 
cart and set him up in a field, and had a farewell 
celebration around him. ... I remember we made 
speeches and broke champagne bottles on him. And 
next day, lo and behold, he was gone — stolen by a 
Siberian infantry regiment. . . . Who knows where 
he is now?" he mused. "Perhaps retreating across 
Galicia with the Siberians." 

At the other end of the table a captain of Ataman- 
ski Cossacks, his narrow eyes glowing, was saying.: 
"You have seen the hiltless Cossack sword?" He 
showed us his own. "It is terrible in their hands! 
They slash with a sidelong stroke — whiz! It cuts a 

119 



THE WAR EsT EASTERN EUROPE 

man in half! Beautiful! But they love to kill. 
When prisoners surrender to them, they say always to 
their colonel: l Aga! Let us cut them! It will dis- 
grace us to bring back babies as prisoners ! ' " 

We tried to explain our purpose in coming, but 
the captain always interrupted with an expansive 
smile: 

"You shall go where you please, my friends. To- 
morrow we will arrange all that. . . . Now eat and 
drink, eat and drink " 

Alexandra Alexandrovna screamed pleasantries 
from a cloud of smoke: 

"It's not polite when you come to visit friends, 
to talk of going away !" 

" Tres jolie!" bellowed Taras Bulba. " You shall 
not leave here until you have taught me to speak 
French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese! I 
have a passion for languages " 

It was now one o'clock in the morning; we were 
worn out. 

"Voyons!" expostulated Madji. "To sleep is a 
ridiculous way to pass the night. ..." 



1 20 



LIFE AT NOVO SIELITZA 

A PLACE had been arranged for us to sleep, and 
we went in a carriage driven by a soldier. In 
all the town there were no lights, except in occasional 
houses where officers were quartered. We pulled up 
before a crude brick house jammed between huddling 
Jewish shops, and waded through a puddle that smelled 
of sewage. The soldier pounded on the door — light 
grew in the chinks, and a woman's voice whined 
timorously. He cursed her for a Jew. "Germanski!" 
he said; "the foreigners!" chains and bolts rattled, 
and a wave of fetid smell rushed out. The woman 
was sharp-featured and bent, with a coarse brown wig 
set awry, cringing in the doorway, her gums bared in 
an obsequious smile. She led the way up a stairway 
that had not been cleaned since the Passover, chatter- 
ing raucous Yiddish: 

"Who are the noble H err en? What do they 
here? Where do they come from? Amerika!" She 
stopped short and peered down at us in amazement. 
" Wun-der-bar ! I have friends in Amerika — Josef 
Hertzovici, for example. Do you know him? No, 
of course not. It is a big land, bigger than this. . . . 
How is it to live in Amerika? Much money — hein? 
And the tall houses of Neu Yorch. Fifty stories? 

121 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Grosser Himmel I . . . But why do you leave Amerika 
and come to Russia?" 

"Why do you ask?" I said. "Isn't it good to 
live here?" 

She gave me a suspicious glance, and fell back 
into a whine: 

"There is little gold here, noble gentlemen, and 
it is hard for the poor. . . . But it is very pleas- 
ant " 

She opened a door, first carefully touching a 
folded paper prayer tacked on the jamb, and on tip- 
toe motioned us to follow. In the corner at a table 
sat an aged Jew in skull-cap, black robe, and heelless 
slippers, reading the Torah by candle-light. His 
bleary eyes peered down through horn spectacles, 
and his white beard moved to the low droning of 
the sacred words. He turned half around, without 
looking at us, and bowed with venerable dignity. . . . 
A most holy Rebbe ! 

Our room lay beyond, furnished with two couches 
of the shape and consistency of marble slabs in the 
morgue. True, there was clean linen, but it smelled 
strongly of gefultefisch. . . . 

We had a balcony jutting out over a wide square 
of mud and garbage and trampled straw, where the 
peasants parked their springless carts when they came 
to town. Deep ditches surrounded it, carrying a slow 
stream of evil-smelling drainage, and on all sides were 
rows of miserable huts where the Jews lived. In that 
square all day long moved a dramatic pageant of 

1 22 



LIFE AT NOVO SIELITZA 

races — sometimes significant, sometimes incoherent 
and obscure. There were subdued, gentle Moldavian 
peasants all in white linen, with wide-brimmed, low- 
crowned hats and long, curling hair falling upon their 
shoulders; and their wives, crowned with the round 
marital "pill-box" under their kerchiefs — big, free- 
moving creatures with stalwart legs bare to the knees. 
Russian mujiks in blouses and peaked caps clumped 
along with heavy boots — bearded giants with blank, 
simple faces, and hale, flat-faced Russian women 
dressed in ghastly combinations of colored kerchiefs 
and shirts — one wore yellow and cerise, another ver- 
milion, apple-green, and baby-blue. Here and there 
the twisted, calculating face of a Russian pope, with 
his long hair, and a great crucifix dancing on the front 
of his robe. Cossacks of the Don without distinctive 
uniform except a broad red stripe down their trousers, 
silver-inlaid sabre with the guardless hilt, and tufted 
love-lock over the left eye; pockmarked Tartars, 
descendants of the Golden Horde who stormed Holy 
Moscow — the strong men of the army — marked by 
a narrow red stripe; Turcomans in enormous white or 
black bearskins, caftans of faded violet or blue, boots 
with pointed toes turned up — splendid with gold 
chains, inlaid belts, daggers, and yataghans. And al- 
ways Jews, Jews, Jews: bowed, thin men in rusty 
derbies and greasy long coats, with stringy beards and 
crafty, desperate eyes, cringing from police, soldiers 
and priests, and snarling at the peasants — a hunted 
people, made hateful by extortion and abuse, by mur- 

123 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

derous competition in the foul, overcrowded cities 
of the Pale. Excitable, whining Jewesses in filthy 
wrappers and coarse wigs; venerable ravs and great 
scholars bent under the weight of virtuous years, 
with leather-bound tomes under their arms; sensitive- 
faced boys who passed repeating their lessons, on the 
way to heder—o. race inbred and poisoned with its 
narrow learning, because it has been "persecuted for 
righteousness' sake," and butchered in the streets by 
men whose banner was the Cross. Jews impregnated 
the mass — the air smelled of Jews. . . . 

Over the patched tin roofs rose the inverted green 
onion atop the Russian church. A blind peasant boy 
knelt upright in the mud beneath our balcony, mut- 
tering prayers and crossing himself with a fluttering 
motion. A bawling, bargaining market was in pro- 
gress in the street beyond. Police in yellow blouses, 
booted and spurred, strolled watchfully by, fingering 
the red cords that hung from their necks to their 
prominent revolvers — bullying Jews, hustling peasants, 
as is the way of police with the weak all the world over. 
And unnoticed by the accustomed world, the fetid 
air shook unceasingly with the sound of big guns, 
only ten miles away. 

At Madji's house the family slouched out one by 
one, yawning and rubbing their eyes. It was after 
ten o'clock. In the entry Antonina was chopping up 
kindling and putting it down the blazing well of the 

samovar — then she shook in charcoal, filled the tea- 

124 



LIFE AT NOVO SIELITZA 

pot with fresh leaves, and we began again the in- 
terminable drinking of tea that keeps up all day and 
all night in Russian houses. 

We delicately called the captain's attention to 
our prospects. 

"Of course you may go to the front," he said. 
"But it is not interesting — unless you care for artillery 
duels. Now there is a lull in the fighting at this 
point. To the north it is very severe — why don't you 
go north?" 

We jumped at the chance. 

"Where do you want to go?" 

Now the American Legation in Bucarest had 
authorized us to report on the welfare of certain Amer- 
ican citizens in the parts of Bucovina and Galicia oc- 
cupied by the Russians, and I consulted the list. No 
one knew exactly where the front was — but by calculat- 
ing the number of miles per day which the Russians 
were retreating, and consulting the map, we picked 
out Zalezchik, a town where there were American 
citizens, as a place likely to be in the zone of action. 

Madji took us to staff headquarters to see the 
general, and he readily gave permission; so the com- 
mandant made us out a pass to Zalezchik. What's 
more, he summoned a Jew who owned a peasant — 
horse, carriage, body, and soul — and bargained with 
him for our transportation. The price was twenty- 
five roubles, paid in advance — of which the peasant 
probably received two. And we were to start at six 
in the morning. 

125 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Colonel Doshdovsky, the one-armed Russian 
commander of all the Turcomans, wore the cross of 
St. George, and the first and second class of the Order 
of Vladimir — for he was a great hero — and his vicious 
Turcoman sword was covered with Persian verses in- 
laid with gold. With him we inspected the Turcoman 
camp. The warriors lived under an open shed in the 
field where their horses were picketed, each horse 
singly — for they were all savage stallions. Never had 
I seen such beautiful horses — lithe, strong, clean- 
muscled, with the arched necks and small heads of 
horses of race. Here and there their riders worked 
over them — pohshing and clipping their hoofs, comb- 
ing their manes, going over their glossy hides minutely 
with pinchers to pull out hairs longer or shorter than 
the others, swaddling them in blankets. 

"They must furnish their own horses," said the 
colonel; "and their horses are their pride. The horse 
often represents its owner's entire fortune. If it is 
killed in a little skirmish of patrols, the poor fellow is 
ruined. Turcomans are liable for military service all 
their lives." 

Many had taken off their long caftans, revealing 
the thin black undergarment, laced tight at the waist, 
that fell to their baggy red trousers. Others had 
doffed the great fur hats — and beneath was a brown 
head shaved bald except for a scalp-lock on the crown, 
covered by a little silk skull-cap. High saddles bossed 
with silver lay around, bundles of rich-colored cloths 
from Khiva and Bokhara and Samarcand, sleeping- 

126 



LIFE AT NOVO SIELITZA 

rugs and praying-rugs whose weave and color are secrets 
of the dead. They wore twisted silver chains down 
their backs, wide sashes of brilliant silk, straight and 
curved daggers inlaid with precious metals, and 
swords in richly ornamented scabbards that perhaps 
Tamerlane had seen. On us they turned their slant- 
ing Mongolian eyes, indifferently, with the incurious 
superiority of world-conquerors, and made smiling, 
sardonic comments to each other. But Robinson 
got out his pad and sketched their portraits, and 
gave them away — and they crowded to pose like 
eager children. 

All day long at Madji's tea flowed, and meals 
followed haphazard, and people drifted in and out. 
Alexandra Alexandrovna shouted and laughed and 
smoked incessantly, changing her kerchief twenty 
times. Taras Bulba insisted on learning French, Span- 
ish, and German all at once, and blustered fiercely 
and ineffectually about. The captain himself was 
busy and distrait — there were several important 
matters to settle; staff-officers came in with bundles 
of papers and crowded his office, all talking loudly at 
once. There seemed to be no method. They all 
straggled from room to room, drinking tea and gossip- 
ing of indifferent things. Madji would determinedly 
seize pen and paper as if to work, then forget all about 
it, and come into the dining-room to hear some funny 
story that was being shouted. A new crowd of officers 
were there for dinner, which happened just as un- 
expectedly as the night before, and half an hour later 

127 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

— but since we were to rise so early, we tore our- 
selves from those hospitable hands. Alexandra, the 
captain, and old Taras Bulba came to the door 
to say good-by. Madji beamed and wished us all 
good luck; Alexandra squeezed our hands with exag- 
gerated feeling, and besought us to come back — 
surely. As for old Taras Bulba, he appeared over- 
come with the effort of searching for a proper French 
phrase. Just as we mounted the carriage he found 
it. His face lighted up; he assumed a rhetorical at- 
titude, extended one arm with a superb gesture, and 
said sternly: "Je vous aime—je vous adore I" 



128 



BREAKING INTO BUCOVINA 

EARLY the next morning we came out of our 
lodgings to the shrill sound of Yiddish blessings 
and reproaches mixed, and found the Jew smirking 
and rubbing his hands. 

"Where's the carriage?" I asked, suspecting 
further extortion. The Jew pointed to a temporary 
scaffolding such as is used for digging artesian wells, 
upon which sat an incredibly discouraged-looking 
mujik. On closer inspection we discovered wheels, 
fastened to arbitrary places with bits of wire and 
rope; and apparently unattached to the structure, 
two aged and disillusioned horses leaned against each 
other. 

"B-r-r-r-r-r-r!" said the mujik to these animals, 
implying that they would run away if he didn't. 
"B-r-r-r-r!" 

We mounted, while the Jew abusively impressed 
upon his driver that we were to be taken to Zalezchik, 
through Boy an and Zastevna; he also told him to 
get whatever money he could out of us. . . . At 
the end of this tirade, the peasant rose and stolidly 
beat the horses with a long string fastened to a stick, 
shouting hoarsely: "Ugh! Eeagh! Augh!" The 
horses awoke, sighed, and moved experimentally — by 
some mechanical miracle the wheels turned, a shudder 
ran along our keel, and we were off ! 

129 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Across the bridge into Austrian Novo Sielitza 
we rattled, and out upon the hard road that led front- 
ward, slowly gaining upon and passing a long train 
of ox-carts driven by soldiers and loaded with cases 
of ammunition. Now we were in Bucovina. On the 
left, low fields green with young crops stretched flatly 
to the trees along the Pruth, beyond which rose the 
rich hills of Rumania; to the right the valley ex- 
tended miles to cultivated rolling country. Already 
the June sun poured down windless, moist heat. 
The driver slumped gradually into his spine, the 
horses' pace diminished to a merely arithmetical pro- 
gression, and we crawled in a baking pall of dust like 
Zeus hidden in his cloud. 

"Hey!" We beat upon his back. "Shake a 
leg, Dave!" 

He turned upon us a dirty, snub-nosed face, and 
eyes peering through matted hair, and his mouth 
cracked slowly in an appalling, familiar grin — with 
the intelligent expression of a loaf of bread. We 
christened him immediately Ivan the Horrible. . . . 

"Ooch!" he cried with simulated ferocity, waving 
the string. "Aich! Augh!" 

The horses pretended to be impressed, and broke 
into a shuffle; but ten minutes later Ivan was again 
rapt in contemplation of the infinite, the horses al- 
most stationary, and we moved in white dust. . . . 

Slowly we drew near the leisurely sound of the 
cannon, that defined itself sharply out of the all- 
echoing thunder audible at Novo Sielitza. And top- 

130 



BREAKING INTO BUCOVINA 

ping a steep hill crowned with a straggling thatched 
village, we came in sight of the batteries. They lay- 
on the hither side of an immense rolling hill, where a 
red gash in the fields dribbled along for miles. At 
intervals of half a minute a gun spat heavily; but 
you could see neither smoke nor flame — only minute 
figures running about, stiffening, and again springing 
to life. A twanging drone as the shell soared — and 
then on the leafy hills across the river puffs of smoke 
unfolding. Over there were the towers of white Czer- 
nowitz, dazzling in the sun. The village through 
which we passed was populous with great brown sol- 
diers, who eyed us sullenly and suspiciously. Over 
a gateway hung a Red Cross flag, and along the road 
trickled a thin, steady stream of wounded — some 
leaning on their comrades, others bandaged around 
the head, or with their arms in slings; and peasant 
carts jolted by with faintly groaning heaps of arms 
and legs. . . . 

The road slanted down until we were close to 
the crashing batteries. For hours we drove along 
behind a desultory but gigantic artillery battle. Gun 
after gun after gun, each in its raw pit, covered with 
brush to shield it from aeroplanes. Sweating men 
staggered under the weight of shells, moving about the 
shining caissons; methodically the breech snapped 
home and the pointer singsonged his range; a firer 
jerked the lanyard — furious haze belched out, gun 
recoiled, shell screamed — miles and miles of great 
cannon in lordly syncopation. 

131 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

In the very field of the artillery peasants were 
calmly ploughing with oxen, and in front of the roar- 
ing guns a boy in white linen drove cattle over the 
hill toward the pastures along the river. We met 
long-haired farmers, with orange poppies in their 
hats, unconcernedly driving to town. Eastward the 
world rolled up in another slow hill that bore curved 
fields of young wheat, running in great waves before 
the wind. Its crest was torn and scarred with mighty 
excavations, where multitudinous tiny men swarmed 
over new trenches and barbed-wire tangles. This 
was the second-line position preparing for a retreat 
that was sure to come. . . . 

We swung northward, away from the artillery, 
over the bald shoulder of a powerful hill. Here the 
earth mounted in magnificent waves, patterned with 
narrow green, brown, and yellow fields that shimmered 
under the wind. Through valleys whose sides fell 
like a bird's swoop were vistas of checkered slopes 
and copses soft with distance. Far to the west the 
faint blue crinkly line of the Carpathians marched 
across the horizon. Tree-smothered villages huddled 
in the immense folds of the land — villages of clay 
houses unevenly and beautifully moulded by hand, 
painted spotless white with a bright blue stripe 
around the bottom, and elaborately thatched. Many 
were deserted, smashed, and black with fire — espe- 
cially those where Jews had lived. They bore marks 
of wanton pillage — for there had been no battle here 
— doors beaten in, windows torn out, and lying all 

132 



BREAKING INTO BUCOVINA 

about the wreckage of mean furniture, rent clothing. 
Since the beginning of the war the Austrians had not 
come here. It was Russian work. . . . 

Peasants smiling their soft, friendly smile took 
off their hats as we went by. A gaunt man with a 
thin baby in his arms ran forward and kissed my 
hand when I gave him a piece of chocolate. Along 
the roadside stood hoary stone crosses inscribed with 
sacred verses in the old Slavonic, before which the 
peasants uncovered and crossed themselves devoutly. 
And there were rude wooden crosses, as in Mexico, 
to mark the spots where men had been assassi- 
nated. . . . 

In a high meadow overlooking the distant river 
and the far-rolling plains of Bucovina we came upon a 
camp of Turcomans — their saddled horses staked to 
graze and their fires burning. Cruel-faced and slant- 
eyed, they squatted about the cook-pots or moved 
among the horses, barbaric notes of color in this green 
northern field, where, perhaps, their ancestors had 
camped with Attila a thousand years ago. Beyond 
the river cousins of theirs lay in the enemy's trenches 
— beyond the ethereal mountains in the west was 
Hungary, the rich land where the scourges of God 
from Asia had finally come to rest. Where the road 
dipped again into the valley was an old stone chapel, 
circular in form and surrounded by a graceful colon- 
nade. It was now gutted, and the horses of Turcoman 
officers were stabled inside. . . . 

At any cross-roads we always knew the right 
i33 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

road to take, because Ivan invariably took the other. 
Although born and bred at Novo Sielitza, fifteen 
miles away, he had never travelled so far abroad. 
Worse, his porous memory could no longer hold the 
name of our destination, no matter how often he re- 
peated it. Every little while he turned and peered 
at us, groaning. "Zalezchik!" we shouted in chorus, 
and he fell to larruping the horses with uncouth cries, 
He pulled up sometimes, until we pointed to a native 
and made signs for him to ask the way. 

"Good day," mumbled Ivan. "Which is the 
road to " 

"The road to where, friend?" asked the man. 

Ivan scratched his head. 

"Where do you want to go?" 

Ivan grinned sheepishly. 

"Zalezchik!" we bawled — and Ivan repeated — 
"Ah, yes, Zalezchik!" 

At noon, we zigzagged up a steep mountain into 
a pine forest, and met a long train of trucks coming 
down, loaded with the steel floats of a pontoon bridge. 
Big Don Cossacks on wiry ponies escorted it, their 
hair-tufts sticking rakishly out under their caps. 

"Aie, Barin!" shouted one of the drivers, point- 
ing southwest. "EfoPruth? IsthatthePruth?" 

I nodded. 

"Two days!" he cried, patting his pontoon. 
"Two days we cross the river. . . . Czernowitz!" 

Still they passed, clanging along the top of the 
i34 



BREAKING INTO BUCOVINA 

mountain. We plunged down through the forest, 
meeting the great wagons crawling up with shouts 
and snapping whips. Steeper and steeper; the trees 
thinned, and suddenly fell away altogether, and the 
tremendous panorama of the valley of the Dniester 
opened out — squares and parallelograms and arcs 
of variegated color clashing and weaving in a mighty 
tapestry of fertile fields, great rounded folds of earth 
sweeping grandly like the ground swell, rambling 
white granges ship-like along the ribbony roads, and 
villages lost in the hollows. The pontoon-trucks 
staggered up, drawn each by eight horses and twenty 
soldiers who pushed, shouting in unison — for a mile 
down the hill the road was filled with lumbering big 
floats rocking from side to side, straining horses flecked 
with white foam, broad-shouldered men curbed with 
an agony of effort. . . . 

Now we were entering a new land. Though the 
peasants still wore white linen, their head-dress 
changed; some wore tall round caps of black fur, 
others high, bell-crowned hats such as Welsh women 
used to wear. The Slavonic crosses gave away to 
tall Catholic crucifixes, decked with all the instru- 
ments of the Passion — the spear, the sponge, the 
gloves, the hammer. We met people who spoke no 
Rumanian — Polish began to replace it. Granges 
where whole patriarchal families had lived stood 
along the road — immense houses containing living- 
rooms, stables, barns all under one roof, with a road 
running through the middle of the building from 

i3S 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

front to back. It was a blasted country, seared with 
battle, and with the triple passing of two great armies. 
The trampled grain was sickly yellow in the fields; 
whole villages in ruins gaped empty, except for Rus- 
sian soldiers, and few men were to be seen except the 
aged and crippled — only women and children, with 
furtive eyes and sunken faces. In the fields among 
the growing crops old trenches crumbled in, and rusty 
barbed-wire entanglements straggled through the wheat 
everywhere. For miles along the left side of the road 
gigantic new trenches and artillery positions were 
building in frantic haste. Thousands of soldiers 
swarmed over the landscape, the afternoon sun flash- 
ing on their lifted spades. Wagons loaded with tools 
and barbed wire impeded the road. Near Zastevna, 
we saw peasant women and children digging under 
the superintendence of non-commissioned officers, a 
long file of them carrying out the dirt in head baskets. 
Why this feverish activity here, twenty miles behind 
the positions occupied by the Russians only a month 
before ? 



136 



ZALEZCHIK THE TERRIBLE 

IT was on the other side of Zastevna, where we 
stopped beside some ruined houses for a drink, that 
we saw the Austrian prisoners. They came limping 
along the road in the hot sun, about thirty of them, 
escorted by two Don Cossacks on horseback; gray 
uniforms white with dust, bristly faces drawn with 
fatigue. One man had the upper left-hand part of 
his face bound up, and the blood had soaked through; 
another's hand was bandaged, and some jerked along 
on improvised crutches. At a sign from the Cossacks, 
who dismounted, they reeled and stumbled to the 
side of the road, and sullenly threw themselves down 
in the shade. Two dark-faced men snarled at each 
other like beasts. The man with the wounded head 
groaned. He with the bandaged hand began trem- 
blingly to unwrap the gauze. The Cossacks good- 
naturedly waved us permission to talk with them, 
and we went over with handfuls of cigarettes. They 
snatched at them with the avidity of smokers long 
deprived of tobacco — all except one haughty-faced 
youth, who produced a handsome case crammed with 
gold-tipped cigarettes, declined ours frigidly, and took 
one of his own, without offering any to the others. 

"He is a Count," explained a simple, peasant- 
faced boy with awe. 

i37 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

The man with the wounded hand had got his 
bandage off at last, and was staring at his bloody palm 
with a sort of fascination. 

"I think this had better be dressed again," said 
he at last, glancing diffidently at a stout, sulky-look- 
ing person who wore a Red Cross arm-band. The 
latter looked across with lazy contempt and shrugged 
his shoulders. 

"We've got some bandages," I began, producing 
one. But one of the Cossacks came over, scowling 
and shaking his head at me. He kicked the Red Cross 
man with a look of disgust, and pointed to the other. 
Muttering something, the stout man fumbled angrily 
in his case, jerked out a bandage, and slouched across. 

There were thirty of them, and among that 
thirty five races were represented: Tcheks, Croats, 
Magyars, Poles, and Austrians. One Croat, two 
Magyars, three Tcheks could speak absolutely not 
a word of any language but their own, and, of course, 
none of the Austrians knew a single word of Bohemian, 
Croatian, Hungarian, or Polish. Among the Austrians 
were Tyroleans, Viennese, and a half-Italian from 
Pola. The Croats hated the Magyars, and the Mag- 
yars hated the Austrians — and as for the Tcheks, no 
one would speak to them. Besides, they were all 
divided up into sharply defined social grades, each of 
which snubbed its inferiors. ... As a sample of 
Franz Joseph's army the group was most illuminating. 

They had been taken in a night attack along the 
Pruth, and marched more than twenty miles in two 

138 



ZALEZCHIK THE TERRIBLE 

days. But they were all enthusiastic in praise of their 
Cossack guards. 

"They are very considerate and kind," said one 
man. "When we stop for the night the Cossacks 
personally go around to each man, and see that he is 
comfortable. And they let us rest often. ..." 

"The Cossacks are fine soldiers," another broke 
in; "I have fought with them, and they are very 
brave. I wish we had cavalry like them ! " 

A young volunteer of the Polish legion asked 
eagerly if Rumania was coming in. We replied that 
it seemed like it, and suddenly he burst out, quivering: 

"My God! My God! What can we do? How 
long can this awful war last? All we want is peace 
and quiet and rest! We are beaten — we are honor- 
ably beaten. England, France, Russia, Italy, the 
whole world is against us. We can lay down our arms 
with honor now! Why should this useless butchery 
go on?" 

And the rest sat there, gloomily listening to him, 
without a word. . . . 

Toward evening we were rattling down a steep 
gully between high cliffs. A stream plunged down 
beside the road, turning a hundred water-wheels 
whose mills lay shattered by artillery fire; shacks in 
partial ruin shouldered each other along the gully, 
and on top of the eastern cliff we could see disem- 
bowelled trenches and an inferno of twisted, snarled 
barbed wire, where the Russians had bombarded and 

*39 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

stormed the Austrian defenses a month before. Hun- 
dreds of men were at work up there clearing away 
the wreckage and building new works. We rounded 
a corner suddenly and came out upon the bank of the 
Dniester, just below where the tall railroad bridge 
plunged into the water its tangle of dynamited girders 
and cables. Here the river made a huge bend, be- 
neath earthen cliffs a hundred feet high, and across 
a pontoon bridge choked with artillery the once lovely 
town of Zalezchik lay bowered in trees. As we crossed, 
naked Cossacks were swimming their horses in the 
current, shouting and splashing, their powerful white 
bodies drenched with golden light. . . . 

Zalezchik had been captured, burned, and looted 
three times by two armies, shelled for fifteen days, 
and the major portion of its population wiped out by 
both sides because it had given aid and comfort to 
the enemy. Night was falling when we drove into the 
market-place, surrounded with the shocking debris 
of tall houses. A sort of feeble market was going on 
there under miserable tilted shacks, where sad-eyed 
peasant women spread their scanty vegetables and 
loaves of bread, the centre of a mob of soldiers. A 
few Jews slunk about the corners. Ivan demanded 
a hotel, but the man smiled and pointed to a tall 
crumbling brick wall with "Grand Hotel" painted 
boldly across it — all that remained. Where could we 
get something to eat? 

"Something to eat? There is not enough food 

in this town to feed my wife and children." 

140 



ZALEZCHIK THE TERRIBLE 

An atmosphere of terror hung over the place — 
we could feel it in the air. It was in the crouching 
figures of the Jews, stealing furtively along the totter- 
ing walls; in the peasants as they got out of the way 
of our carriage, dofhng their hats; in the faces of 
cringing children, as soldiers went by. It got dark, 
and we sat in the carriage, debating what to do. 

An "Apteka" — apothecary shop — stood on the 
corner, comparatively undamaged, with a light in- 
side. I found the druggist alone, a Jew who spoke 
German. 

"What are you?" he asked suspiciously, peering 
at me. 

"An American. " 

"There is no hotel here," he burst out suddenly. 
"There is no place to stay and nothing to eat. A 
month ago the Russians came in here — they slaugh- 
tered the Jews, and drove the women and children 
out there." He pointed west. "There is no place 
here " 

"Then," I said, "the military commandant must 
take care of us. Where can I find him?" 

"I will send my assistant with you," he answered. 
His face stiffened with fear. "You will not say to 
them what I have told, noble Herr? You will 
not " 

The entry of two Russian soldiers interrupted 
him, and he rose, addressing me insolently for their 
benefit: 

"I can't drive you out of the shop. It's a public 
141 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

shop. But remember, I assume no responsibility for 
you. I didn't ask you to come here. I don't know 
you." For, after all, we might be undesirable people. 
We bestowed upon Ivan a two-rouble piece, 
which, after biting, he put away in his pocket with 
hoarse sounds betokening gratitude. And we left 
him sitting on his vehicle in the middle of the square, 
gazing at nothing. When we came out of the Apteka 
he was still there, hunched over in the same position, 
and an hour later, when we issued from the colonel's 
headquarters, he had not moved, though it was 
quite dark. What was passing in that swampy mind ? 
Perhaps he was trying to remember the name of 
Novo Sielitza, his home — perhaps he was merely 
wondering how to get there. . . . 

We sat long over dinner with the genial colonel 
and his staff, chattering politics and gossip in in- 
tensely fragmentary German. Among other officers 
were a young Finnish lieutenant and an old Cossack 
major with a wrinkled Mongolian face like the pic- 
tures of Li Hung Chang, who were very much excited 
over the sinking of the Lusitania, and sure that Amer- 
ica would go to war. 

"What can we do for you?" asked the colonel. 

We said that we would like to visit this part of 
the front, if there were any fighting going on. 

"That, I am afraid, is impossible from here," he 
regretted. "But if you will go to Tarnopol, the gen- 
eral commanding this army will surely give you per- 

142 



ZALEZCHIK THE TERRIBLE 

mission. Then you must return here, and I shall be 
glad to accompany you myself. A train for Tarnopol 
leaves to-night at eleven." 

Could he give us any idea what was happening 
along the front? 

"With pleasure," said he eagerly, telling an 
orderly to bring the maps. He spread them out on 
the table. "Now here, near Zadagora, we have ten 
big guns placed in these positions, to stop the Austrian 
flanking column that is rolling up from the Pruth. 
Over here, near Kaluz, the Austrians imagine that 
we have nothing but cavalry, but in about three days 
we'll throw three regiments across this little stream 
at this point " 

I remarked that all those maps seemed to be 
German or Austrian maps. 

"Oh, yes," he replied. "At the beginning of the 
war we had no maps at all of Bucovina or Galicia. 
We didn't even know the lay of the land until we had 
captured some. . . ." 



143 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

IN the morning we woke stiff and cramped from 
the benches of our third-class car, and looked out 
the window upon the boundless Galician steppe, 
heavy with golden wheat and with ploughed land 
deeper than velvet; ten-mile planes of flat earth up- 
tilted gently against horizons where giant windmills 
rode hull down, like ships at sea. We had made 
thirty miles in nine hours. 

The train whistled triumphantly down long in- 
clines, and panted up slopes where the mounting 
track was visible for miles and miles. Our car was 
full of officers making the cheerful hubbub that Rus- 
sians always make together. And from the ten freight- 
cars full of troops behind came nasal accordion music, 
the slow roar of big voices singing, shouts and cheers. 
At little stations where the flat-faced, sombrely 
dressed Polish peasants and their bright-kerchiefed, 
broad-hipped women stared stolidly at the train, 
hundreds of soldiers and officers with teapots jostled 
each other democratically around the kipiatok — the 
huge tank of boiling water you find at every Russian 
railway- station — and there was incessant tea. An 
officer of high rank, who had an orderly, set up a small 
brass samovar in the next compartment to ours. . . . 

From a strap over his shoulder hung a gold- 
144 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

hilted Cossack sword, the gift of the Czar for bravery 
— it bore also the tassel of the Order of Vladimir. 
The orderly, probably a mujik from one of his estates, 
called him familiarly "Ivan Ivanovitch." Presently 
he came over with true Russian hospitality, and in- 
vited us in French to drink a glass of chai. We got 
to talking about the war. 

"Nevertheless, it is impossible to beat Russia," 
said he. 

I objected that Russia had been beaten many 
times. 

"You mean the Japanese War. I served in 
Manchuria myself, and I think I can tell you why 
we were beaten. In the first place the peasants knew 
nothing of the causes of the war, and no one took the 
trouble to tell them. They had never heard of the 
Japanese. 'We are not angry with the Japanese, 
whoever they may be,' said the mujiks. 'Why should 
we fight them?' 

"And then everything was horribly mismanaged. 
I have seen troops, worn out and half starved by 
a forty days' railway journey on insufficient food, 
detrained and sent into battle without an hour's rest. 
And there was the vodka, too, which we haven't got 
to reckon with to-day. Before the battle of Mukden 
I saw whole regiments lying in a drunken sleep on 
the ground. ... It was an unpopular war — there 
was no patriotism among the peasants." 

"And is there patriotism now?" 

"Yes, they are very patriotic — they hate the Ger- 
i4S 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

mans. You see, most of the agricultural machinery 
comes from Germany, and this machinery does the 
work of many men, driving the peasants into the 
factories at Petrograd and Moscow and Riga and 
Odessa. Then the Germans flood Russia with cheap 
goods which undersell Russian products — which causes 
our factories to shut down and throws thousands out 
of work. In the Baltic provinces, too, German land- 
lords own all the soil, and the peasants live miser- 
ably. . . . Wherever in Russia they have no feeling 
against the Germans, we tell them these things. . . . 
Oh, yes, this time the Russians know why they are 
fighting!" 

"So the peasants think that by beating the Ger- 
mans they will get rid of poverty and oppression?" 

He nodded good-humoredly. Robinson and I 
both had the same thought: if the peasants were go- 
ing to beat any one, why didn't they begin at home? 
Afterward we discovered that they were beginning at 
home. 

Late in the morning we stopped within sight of 
the towers of Tarnopol, alongside a huge hospital- 
train which was marked with the imperial arms and 
bore the legend: "Sanitary Train, Gift of the Im- 
peratrice Alexandra Feodorovna." 

"Come on," said our friend, ordering his baggage 
out. "We had better change trains. Ours will prob- 
ably stay here until afternoon." 

We swung aboard the hospital-train just as it 
146 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

left, and found ourselves in a little car divided into 
two compartments by a rough board partition. 
Wooden bunks were folded up against the sides; in 
one corner was a stove covered with dirty pots and 
pans; trunks, a tin wash-basin on a box fastened to 
the wall, and clothes suspended from nails, gave it 
the look of a ship's forecastle. 

In one compartment sat two middle-aged minor 
officers, and in the other a stout, comfortable-looking 
woman and a young girl. The two men and the 
women were smoking cigarettes, and throwing the butts 
on the maculate floor; steaming glasses of tea littered 
the tables; the windows were closed. 

The girl spoke German and a little French; the 
woman was her mother, the grizzled sanitary lieutenant 
her father, and the second captain of engineers her 
uncle. Since the beginning of the war ten months ago 
they had been living in this car, travelling from Vilna 
and Kiev to the front, and back again with the 
wounded. 

"My mother wouldn't let my father go to the 
war without her, and she made so much fuss that he 
took us both. . . . And my uncle's father-in-law is 
a Collegiate Assessor and a Judge in the government 
of Minsk, so he managed to get us this car to live in." 

"Have you seen any fighting?" 

"Twice," she answered. "Near Warsaw last 
winter a German shell struck one of our cars and 
blew it to pieces — there we were under artillery fire 
all day. And only last week, beyond Kalusz, the 

i47 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

whole train was captured by Austrians. But they 
let us go again. . . . We're bound for Vilna now 
with a load of wounded. In two days we'll be back 
there. . . ." 

Tea and cigarettes were forthcoming, with the 
customary large-hearted Russian hospitality, and we 
sat around while they told us of the pleasures of a 
perpetual travelling vacation — for all the world like 
their ancestors, the nomadic Russian tribes. 

Tarnopol station was a place of vast confusion. 
From a long military train poured running soldiers 
with tin teapots to the kipiatok, hurtling a column 
of infantry that was marching across to another train. 
Officers shouted and cursed, beating with the flat of 
their swords. Engines whistled hysterically, bugles 
blared — calling the men back to their cars. Some 
hesitated and stopped, undecided whether to go 
forward or back; others ran faster. Around the hot- 
water tanks was a boiling, yelling mob. Clouds of 
steam rose from the pouring faucets. . . . Hundreds 
of peasant refugees — Poles, Moldavians, and Hunga- 
rians — squatted along the platform waiting stolid and 
bewildered among their bundles and rolls of bedding; 
for as they retreated the Russians were clearing the 
country of every living thing and destroying houses 
and crops. . . . The station-master waved futile 
hands in the centre of a bawling crowd of officers and 
civilians, all flourishing passes and demanding when 
their various trains departed. . . . 

148 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

An armed sentry at the door tried to stop us, but 
we pushed by. He made a half -motion with his rifle, 
took a step and paused irresolutely, bellowing some- 
thing about passes — and we went on. A hundred 
spies could have entered Tarnopol. . . . 

"Na Stap!" we cried to the cabby: "To the 
Staff!" Along the railroad yards on each side were 
mountains of sacks and boxes higher than the houses. 
Tarnopol was a city of solid Polish architecture, with 
occasional big modern German buildings, and sudden 
vistas of narrow busy streets lined with hundreds of 
shops, all painted with signs picturing the goods sold 
within; streets swarming with Jews in long black 
coats and curly brimmed black hats. Here they 
looked better off and less servile than in Novo Sielitza. 
As everywhere in Galicia and Poland, there was a 
smell of combined "kosher," boot-leather, and what 
we call "Polak"; it filled the air, tainted the food we 
ate, and impregnated our very bedclothes. 

Half-way down the street we met a column of 
soldiers marching four abreast toward the railway 
station, bound for the front. Less than a third had 
rifles. 

They came tramping along with the heavy, 
rolling pace of booted peasants, heads up, arms swing- 
ing — bearded giants of men with dull, brick-red hands 
and faces, dirty-brown belted blouses, blanket-rolls 
over their shoulders, intrenching-tools at their belts, 
and great wooden spoons stuck in their boot-tops. 
The earth shook under their tread. Row after row 

149 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

of strong, blank, incurious faces set westward toward 
unknown battles, for reasons incomprehensible to 
them. And as they marched, they sang — a plain 
chant as simple and tremendous as a Hebrew psalm. 
A lieutenant at the head of the column sang one bar, 
the first sergeant took him up — and then like a dammed- 
up river burst the deep easy voice of three thousand 
men, flung out from great chests in a rising sudden 
swell of sound, like organs thundering: 

"For the last time I walk with you my friends — 
For the last time ! 

And to-morrow, early in the morning, 
Will weep my mother and my brethren, 
For I am going away to the war ! 
And also will weep my sweetheart, 
Whom I have loved for many, many years. . . . 
She whom I hoped one day to go with to the church. . . . 
I swear that I will love her until I die !" 

They passed, and the roaring slow chorus rose 
and fell crashing fainter and fainter. Now we rode 
between interminable hospitals, where haggard, white- 
draped figures leaned listlessly from the windows, 
bleached yellow from long confinement. Soldiers 
crowded the streets — wounded men on crutches, old 
Landwehr veterans, regulars, and boys who couldn't 
have been more than seventeen. There were three 
soldiers to every civilian; though that may have been 
partly due to the fact that many Jews had been "ex- 
pelled" when the Russians entered the town — a dark 
and bloody mystery that. On each corner stood an 

150 








BLIND FOR LIFE. (KOVEL.) 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

armed sentry, scrutinizing the passers-by with the 
menacing look of a suspicious peasant. As we drove 
by in our Stetson hats, knickerbockers and puttees — 
never before seen in that country of universal boots — 
they stared open-mouthed. You could read on their 
faces the painfully born doubt about us — but by that 
time we were blocks away. 

"Stowi!" growled the guard before Staff head- 
quarters, lowering his bayonet. "Stop! Shto takoi?" 

We wanted an officer who could speak French 
or German. 

"Are you Niemetski?" he asked, using the old 
peasant word for Germans — meaning "dumb," for 
the first Germans in Russia couldn't speak the lan- 
guage. 

"We are Americans." Other soldiers gathered 
to listen. 

"Amerikanska!" said one man with a cunning 
smile. "If you are Americans, tell me what language 
the Americans speak." 

"They speak Angliiski." 

At this they all looked inquiringly at the learned 
soldier, who nodded. An officer appeared, looked us 
up and down very severely, and asked us in German 
who we were and what we were doing. We explained. 
He scratched his head, shrugged his shoulders, and 
disappeared. Another, a huge bearded man, bustled 
out now and tried us with Russian, Polish, and broken 
French. It was evidently a poser for him, too, for he 
walked vaguely up and down, pulling at his beard. 

151 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Finally he despatched several orderlies in different di- 
rections, and motioned us to follow him. We entered 
a large room that had evidently been a theatre, for 
there was a stage at one end hung with a gaudily 
painted curtain. About thirty men in undress uni- 
form bent over desks, laboriously writing out by hand 
the interminable documents of bureaucratic routine. 
One was cautiously experimenting with a new inven- 
tion, the typewriter, which evidently none of them 
had ever seen before, and which caused everybody 
great amusement. 

A young officer came out of an inside room, and 
began to fire stern questions in rapid French. Who 
were we? What were we doing here? How did we 
come? We told our story. 

"Through Bucovina and Galicia!" he cried in 
astonishment. "But no civilians are permitted to 
enter Bucovina and Galicia ! " 

We produced our passes. 

"You are correspondents? But don't you know 
that no correspondents can come to Tarnopol?" 

We pointed out that in fact we were there. He 
seemed at a loss. 

"What is your business?" said he uncertainly. 

I told him that we wanted to visit the front of 
the Ninth Army, and to find out about certain Amer- 
ican citizens in Galicia — at the request of the American 
minister in Bucarest. He ran his eye down the list of 
names. 

"Bah! Jews!" he remarked disgustedly. "Why 
152 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

does your country admit Jews to citizenship? Or, if 
it does, why doesn't it keep them at home? Where 
do you want to go — Strij? Kalusz? That is not 
possible!" 

"Ah," I said, "then Strij and Kalusz are on the 
first line now?" 

He grinned. "No. The second line — the Ger- 
man second line !" 

We were astounded by the rapidity of the Ger- 
man advance. 

"It is only a question of time," he went on in- 
differently. "They will soon be here." And suddenly 
he sprang to attention. "The general!" 

The thirty clerks leaped to their feet with one 
bound. 

" Good day, my children," said a pleasant voice. 

"Good day to your generalship!" shouted the 
clerks in unison — and sat down again to their work. 

General Lichisky was a man under middle age, 
with a keen, smiling face. He saluted us and cordially 
shook hands. 

"So you wish to go to the front?" he said, when 
the officer had explained. "I don't understand how 
you managed to get here — for correspondents have 
not been allowed in Tarnopol at all. However, your 
papers are perfectly satisfactory. But I cannot per- 
mit you to visit the first line; the Grand Duke has 
issued an order absolutely forbidding it. You had 
better go to Lvov — Lemberg — and see what can be 
done through Prince Bobrinski, governor-general of 

i53 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Galicia. ... I will give you passes. In the mean- 
while, you may stay here as long as your business re- 
quires it. . . ." 

He detailed a young subofficer who spoke Eng- 
lish to look after us, and ordered that we should be 
lodged at the hotel reserved for officers of the Staff, 
and dine at the mess. 

We wandered about the town. Tarnopol was 
full of troops — regiments returning from the front for 
a rest, others going out, still more, fresh troops, ar- 
riving from Russia with uniforms yet unsoiled by 
battle; mighty singing choruses shocked and smashed 
against each other in a ceaseless surge of big voices. 
Few of the men had arms. Long wagon-trains loaded 
with immense quantities of flour, meat, and canned 
food filed toward the west — but we saw no ammunition. 

A young lieutenant told us things. He had been 
through the Masurian Lakes disaster, and later in the 
Carpathians. 

"Even before the retreat," he said, "we didn't 
have half enough rifles or ammunition. My com- 
pany, for example, was stationed in two trenches — 
a front trench and a reserve trench. A third of my 
men were in the first trench, and they had rifles. All 
the rest had no rifles — their duty was to go forward, 
one by one, and pick up the rifles of those who were 
killed. . . ." 

As we walked along, the guards on the corners 
gathered and looked at us, whispering, until they 
made up their minds that we were German spies — 

i54 




A SOLDIER ON DUTY GAPED FOR SEVERAL MINUTES AT OUR PUTTEES. 
(TARNOPOL.) 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

then they arrested us and took us to the Prefecture. 
There no one knew what to do with us, so we were 
solemnly marched to the Staff, where our friend the 
French-speaking officer set us free again, loading our 
captors with abuse. The poor guards slunk away in 
great bewilderment; their orders were to arrest sus- 
picious-looking persons, and when they did so, they 
were threatened with the knout. At regular intervals 
all day we were arrested by new sets of soldiers, and 
the same farce gone through. 

"Beasts!" shouted the officer, shaking his fist at 
the poor, puzzled soldiers. "Fools! I'll have you 
punished!" 

We suggested mildly that he might give us a pass 
which we could show to people when they stopped 
us, but he said that he had no authority. . . . 

Late in the afternoon we stood near the bar- 
racks, watching a long column of sullen Austrian 
prisoners marching in between their guards. A sol- 
dier on duty gaped for several minutes at our puttees, 
let his eyes slowly travel up our costumes, and finally 
arrested us, and took us up to a major in spectacles 
who stood on the corner. 

He questioned us in German, and I answered. 
He peered suspiciously over his glasses. 

"Where are your passports?" 

I said that we had left them at the hotel. 

"I think I shall take you to the Staff," said he. 

"We have already been to the Staff," said I. 

"Hum!" he meditated. "Then to the Police." 
i55 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"What is the use of that? We've already been 
to the Police." 

"Hum!" It was puzzling, so he changed the 
subject. "You are correspondents? In what coun- 
tries have you been?" 

"We have just come from Serbia." 

"And how is it in Serbia?" 

I said that the sickness was terrible there. 

" Sickness ! " said he. " What sickness ? " He had 
never heard of the typhus. "Really!" he said in- 
differently. "Tell me; will Italy enter the war, do 
you think?" 

"Italy has already been in the war for six weeks." 

"You don't say !" he yawned. "Well, gentlemen, 
I must leave you. Very happy to have made your ac- 
quaintance — sehr angenehm. . . ." and he bowed and 
walked away. 

No one knew when the train for Lemberg left; 
our officer telephoned to the quartermaster, who 
called up the chief of transport, who in turn asked 
the chief of the railway administration. The answer 
was that everything was so mixed up that there was 
no certainty — it might leave in five minutes and it 
might leave to-morrow morning. So we plunged 
again into the frightful melee at the station, stacked 
our bags against the wall, and sat down to wait. Long 
files of stretchers bore groaning wounded to hospital- 
trains, running soldiers jostled each other, officers 
bawled hoarsely, sweating conductors made despair- 

156 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

ing gestures about their trains blocked interminably 
along the tracks. A fat colonel confronted the harassed 
station-master, pointing to his regiment drawn up 
along the freight platform as far as the eye could reach. 

"Where the devil is my train?" he shouted. The 
station-master shrugged. 

There were cavalry officers in green trousers, 
with broad sabres; subalterns of the automobile and 
aeroplane corps who carried blunt, ivory-handled 
daggers in place of swords; Cossack atamans from 
Ural and Kuban with pointed, turned-up boots, long 
caftans open in front and laced at the waist, tall fur 
hats barred on top with gold and red, belts bossed 
with precious metals and silver-mounted yataghans; 
generals of various degrees of generality. There were 
club-footed officers, near-sighted officers who couldn't 
see to read, one-armed and epileptic officers. Minor 
officials of the postal service and the railway went by 
dressed like field-marshals and carrying swords. Al- 
most every one wore a uniform with gold or silver 
shoulder-straps; their number and variety were be- 
wildering. Scarcely an officer whose breast was not 
decorated with the gold and silver badges of the Poly- 
technic or the Engineering School, the bright ribbons 
of the Orders of Vladimir, St. George, or St. Michael; 
gold-hilted honor swords were frequent. And every 
one incessantly saluted every one else. . . . 

Seven hours later we boarded the train for Lem- 
berg, and got into a compartment with two shabby, 
middle-aged lieutenants who were typical of nine- 

iS7 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

tenths of the minor Russian bureaucrats. We began 
talking ragged German, and I asked them about the 
suppression of vodka. 

"Vodka! " said one. "You may be sure they 
didn't suppress the vodka without making up the 
money lost in some other way. It is all very well for 
war-time — you know, the Revolution in 1905 was 
due entirely to the peasants' getting drunk on vodka— 
but after the war we shall have vodka again. Every- 
body wants vodka. They cannot stop it." 

His companion asked if there were compulsory 
military service in America. I said no. 

"Like England," he nodded. "That is all very 
well for you, but in Russia it wouldn't do at all. The 
peasants wouldn't fight." 

"But I thought the people were very enthusiastic 
about the war? " 

"Pooh!" he answered contemptuously. "The 
Russian peasant is a very silly person. He cannot 
read or write. If you asked him to volunteer, he would 
say that he was very comfortable where he was, and 
didn't care to be killed. But when you order him to 
go, he goes ! " 

I wanted to know whether there was any or- 
ganized opposition to the war. The first man nodded. 

"Fifteen members of the Duma — they can't 
execute Duma members — are in prison for sending 
revolutionary propaganda to the army. The men 
who circulated it in the ranks have all been shot. 
They were mostly Jews. . . ." 

158 



BEHIND THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

It took fourteen hours to go forty-five miles. We 
halted hours on switches to let military trains go by, 
and long white strings of silent cars that smelled of 
iodoform. Again miles and miles of wheat-fields 
yellowing richly — a wonderful harvest here. The 
country was alive with soldiers. They thronged every 
station; half-armed regiments slouched along the 
platform, waiting for their trains; trains of cavalry 
and their horses, trains of flat cars piled high with 
supplies, preceded and followed us, or passed going 
in the other direction. Everywhere utter disorganiza- 
tion — a battalion side-tracked all day without food, 
and farther on huge dining sheds where thousands of 
meals were spoiling, because the men didn't come. 
Engines whistled impatiently for a clear track. . . . 
One had an impression of vast forces hurled carelessly 
here and there, of indifference on a grand scale, of gi- 
gantic waste. 

How different from the faultless German machine 
I saw at work in northern France four months after 
the occupation ! There, too, was a problem of trans- 
porting millions of men, of hurrying them from one 
point to another, of carrying arms, ammunition, food, 
and clothing for them. But although northern France 
is covered with railroads and Galicia is not, the Ger- 
mans had built new four-track lines plunging across 
country and cutting through cities, over bridges made 
of steel and concrete, erected in eighteen days. In 
German France trains were never late. . . . 



i59 



LEMBERG BEFORE THE GERMANS CAME 

THE immense station at Lemberg — or Lvov in 
Polish — was choked with troops running and 
calling, with soldiers asleep on the filthy floor, with 
stupefied refugees wandering vaguely about. No one 
questioned or stopped us, though Lemberg was one of 
the forbidden places. We drove through the ancient 
and royal Polish city, between the gloomy walls of 
great stone buildings like Roman and Florentine 
palaces — once the seats of the world's proudest no- 
bility. In little squares among the mediaeval twisted 
streets were Gothic churches of the great period — high, 
thin roofs, spires of delicate stone tracery, and rich 
rose-windows. Immense modern German buildings 
bulked across the noble sky-line, and there were the 
brilliant shops, restaurants and cafes, wide green 
squares of a big city. Shabby Jewish quarters en- 
croached on the smart streets, Uttered with filth and 
populous with noisy Hebrews, but here their houses 
and shops were wider, they laughed more, walked more 
like free people than in the other places we had been. 
Soldiers — always soldiers — shuffling Jews, and quick, 
gesticulating Poles — the ugliest race in the world — 
thronged the sidewalks. Everywhere were wounded 
men in every stage of convalescence. Whole streets 
of houses had been turned into temporary hospitals. 

1 60 



LEMBERG BEFORE THE GERMANS CAME 

Never in any country during the war have I seen such 
vast numbers of wounded as behind the Russian front. 

The Hotel Imperial was an old palace. Our room 
measured twenty-five feet by thirty, fourteen feet 
high, and the outside walls were nine feet thick. We 
breakfasted, lost in the wastes of this vast apartment; 
and then, because our pass read, "The bearers must 
report immediately to the Chancellery of the governor- 
general of Galicia," we took our way to the ancient 
palace of the Polish kings, where the local Russian 
bureaucracy was functioning with all its clumsy in- 
effectualness. 

A surging crowd of refugees and civilians of all 
sorts beat about the clerk's desk in the anteroom. 
Finally he took our pass, read it attentively two or 
three times, turned it upside down, and handed it 
back with a shrug of the shoulders. He paid no further 
attention to us. So we forced our way past several 
sentries into an inner office, where an officer sat writ- 
ing at a desk. He looked at the pass and smiled 
sweetly. 

"Ya nisnayo" said he. "I know nothing about 
it." 

We asked for some one who could speak French 
or German, and he went to find one. Three-quarters 
of an hour later he returned with an oldish captain 
who spoke some German. We explained that General 
Lichisky had ordered us to report to the Chancellery, 
and that we wanted to go to the front. 

"I will show you. This way." He motioned us 
161 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

down a passage. We walked on for some time, and 
suddenly looking around, missed him. We never 
saw him again. 

Immediately ahead was a door marked "Staff 
of the Governor-General," which we entered, telling 
the orderly that we wanted to speak to some one who 
understood French or German. A genial colonel 
promptly appeared, shaking hands and introducing 
himself: "Piotr Stefanovitch Verchovsky, d votre ser- 
vice." We told our tale. 

"Please wait a few minutes, gentlemen," said 
he, "and I will arrange your affair." 

He took our pass and disappeared. Four hours 
later an orderly came into the room and handed me 
the pass, shrugging his shoulders. 

"Where is Colonel Verchovsky?" we demanded. 

" Ne poniemayo /" he muttered. "I don't under- 
stand!" 

I went to the door and sent the orderly to find 
the colonel; and in a few minutes he appeared, polite 
as ever, but greatly surprised to see us still there. 

"Your pass distinctly says that you must report 
to the Chancellery," he explained, "but I have tried 
in vain to find the proper department. The truth is 
that we are in great confusion here on account of this 
morning's news. I advise you to go to Prince Bobrin- 
ski's personal headquarters, and ask to speak with his 
aide-de-camp, Prince Troubetskoi. . . . But don't 
say I sent you." 

There were four sets of suspicious sentries to 
162 



LEMBERG BEFORE THE GERMANS CAME 

pass on our way to the governor's. We sent in our 
cards, and were immediately ushered into a room 
full of smartly dressed officers smoking, laughing and 
talking, and reading newspapers. One dashing boy 
in a hussar uniform, surrounded by a gay circle, was 
telling in French a story about himself and a Polish 
countess whom he had met at Nice. ... A gentle- 
faced, bearded pope of the Russian church, in a long, 
black-silk soutane, with a huge silver crucifix dangling 
from a silver neck-chain, paced up and down arm in 
arm with a bull-necked colonel covered with decora- 
tions. . . . Nothing seemed farther from this easy, 
pleasantMnannered company than war. 

A great handsome youth with shining teeth under 
a heavy mustache came forward, holding out his hand. 

"I'm Troubetskoi," said he in English. "How 
on earth did you manage to get here? It is impossible 
for correspondents to enter Lemberg!" 

We produced quantities of passes signed by 
generals and their chiefs of staff. 

"Americans!" he sighed, biting his lips to re- 
press a grin. "Americans ! What's the use of regula- 
tions when Americans are about? I don't understand 
how you found out I was here, or why you came to 
me." 

We murmured something about having met 
Troubetskoi the sculptor, in New York. 

"Ah yes," said he. "That is the international 
one. He does not speak Russian, I believe. . . . But 
now you are here, what can I do for you?" 

163 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"We want to go to the front." Here he shook 
his head doubtfully. "At least we thought the gov- 
ernor-general might let us visit Przsemysl " 

"I'm sure he would," grinned the prince, "but 
for the regrettable news of this morning. The Aus- 
trians entered Przsemysl at eight o'clock!" 

We had not dreamed that it would fall so soon. 
"Do you think they will get to Lemberg?" 

"Very probably," he answered in an uninterested 
tone. "Neither are now of any strategic value. We 
are rectifying our line." Then changing the subject, 
he said that he would see the governor-general himself 
and ask what could be done for us. Would we come 
in the morning? 

The pope, who had been listening, now asked in 
very good English, what part of America we were 
from. 

"I have been in America for sixteen years," he 
said, smiling. "For eight years I was priest of the 
Greek church in Yonkers, New York. I came back 
for the war to help all I could. . . . Now I only wait 
for peace to go back yonder." 

As we emerged on the street, a column of gigantic 
soldiers, four deep, rounded the corner with their 
tin buckets swinging, tramping to their kitchens for 
dinner. Just in front of the palace the front rank 
burst into song, and with a roar the following ranks 
joined in: 

"I remember when I was a young girl, 
During the army manoeuvres 
164 



LEMBERG BEFORE THE GERMANS CAME 

To my village came a young officer 

With soldiers, and he said to me, 

' Give me some water to drink. ' 

When he finished drinking, he stooped from his horse 

And kissed me. 

Long stood I looking after him as he went away, 

And all night I could not sleep — 

All night he was in my dreams. . . . 

Many years after, when I was a widow 

And had married off my four daughters, 

To my village came an old general; 

And he was broken and wounded with many wounds. 

He groaned. When I looked at him my heart beat fast — 

It was the same young officer, I could not mistake him: 

Brave as ever — the same voice, 

Brave as ever — the same eyes, 

But many white hairs in his mustache. 

And so, as many years ago, this night I cannot sleep, 

And all night in my dreams I see him. ..." 

Now through all the streets poured rivers of 
soldiers singing. We could see their hats flowing 
along the end of the avenue, over the top of a little 
rise. Grand choruses met, clashing like cross-seas in 
the echoing hollows between tall buildings — the city 
hummed with deep melody. This was the inex- 
haustible strength of Russia, the powerful blood of 
her veins spilled carelessly from her bottomless foun- 
tains of manhood, wasted, lavished. The paradox of 
a beaten army which gathers strength, a retreating 
host whose very withdrawal is fatal to the conquerors. 

Our Russian money was running low, so in the 
morning we went out to change our English gold. 

165 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

But no one wanted English gold. Everybody asked 
the same question, in a low voice, peering around to 
see that no soldiers were within hearing: "Have you 
any Austrian money?" For already it was rumored 
in the city that the Austrians were coming again. 

We kept our appointment with Troubetskoi, 
who led us through the ancient throne-room of the 
palace to the office of the governor-general's assistant, 
a pleasant-mannered officer whose coat blazed with 
decorations. 

"Prince Troubetskoi and I have really done our 
best for you," he said with a friendly smile. "But 
the governor regrets that he cannot give you per- 
mission to visit the front. For that you must apply 
to the military authorities — he is simply a civil official, 
you know. . . . However, I haven't a doubt that 
they will allow you to go. And in that case, return 
here and we shall be most happy to take care of you." 

We asked where the permission was to be had. 

"There are two ways. Either you may proceed 
to Petrograd, and arrange matters with his Highness 
the Grand Duke Nicolai Nicolaievitch through your 
ambassadors, or go to Cholm in Poland, which is the 
headquarters of General Ivanov, commander-in-chief 
of the southwestern front. Both Prince Troubetskoi 
and I think you will be more successful if you make 
application to General Ivanov, and his Excellency the 
governor-general is of the same opinion. I will give 
you passes which will carry you to Cholm." 

At midnight we left the hotel to catch the train 
166 



LEMBERG BEFORE THE GERMANS CAME 

for Cholm, and there being no cabs in sight, an officer 
bound for the station called out in French that he 
would be happy if we would share his. His oval, 
half-Semitic face might have been copied' from an 
Assyrian wall-painting — he said he was a Georgian 
from the Caucasus. 

"The Georgian regiments have been ordered 
here from the Turkish front, because of their heroic 
conduct. The Grand Duke has done right; we Geor- 
gians are by far the bravest soldiers in the army," 
said he. 

"Will the Austrians take Lemberg?" asked Rob- 
inson. 

"Oh yes," he answered complacently: "We ex- 
pect them every day now. But it doesn't matter, 
you know. Next winter we'll come back — or the 
winter after." 



167 



AN OPTIMISTIC PILGRIMAGE 

CHOLM is not a hundred miles in an air-line from 
Lemberg, but there is no direct railroad between 
them; one must make a wide detour into Russia and 
back through Poland, more than three hundred miles. 

We were in a compartment for four, the other 
two being a silent young lieutenant who lay in his 
berth with his boots on, smoking, and a crotchety 
old general invalided home. The general tried to 
shut tight both door and window — for the Russians 
share with other Continental peoples a morbid fear of 
fresh air. Followed a dramatic battle lasting all 
night, in which stalwart American manhood defied 
the liveried minions of the Tzar to close that window 
— but was finally subdued at dawn by the railroad 
police. . . . 

White Russia. For hours we rode through an 
untouched wilderness of birch and pine without see- 
ing a house or a human being, the engine's whistle 
alone breaking the echoing silence of the woods. 
Sometimes a gap in the forest gave glimpses of wide 
yellow plains, where black tree-stumps stood among the 
wheat. Wretched villages huddled around the govern- 
ment vodka shop — now closed — wooden huts roofed 
with neglected thatch, which straggled miserably be- 

168 



AN OPTIMISTIC PILGRIMAGE 

side muddy, rutted spaces populous with rooting pigs 
and immense flocks of geese. . . . 

Great-shouldered women were working in the 
fields, mowing with broad strokes rhythmically abreast 
— probably some Female Mowers' Guild from a distant 
country. There were plenty of young, strong mujiks 
everywhere. They swung axes amid crashing-down 
trees, drove singing along the roads, and swarmed 
over the joists and timbers of giant miles of sheds 
that covered the mountainous heaps of army supplies. 
Yet not for an instant could we forget the war. The 
towns were all full of shouting soldiers; train after 
train whirled westward, packed with them. And as 
we paused on side-tracks, past glided an endless pro- 
cession of white sanitary cars with pale, agonized 
faces peering from the windows under their bandages. 
Every village had its military hospital. . . . 

We changed trains at Rovno, where there was a 
wait of nine hours. There we ran into Miroshnikov, 
the English-speaking subofficer who had looked after 
us in Tarnopol, now bound north on official business. 

"Let's walk around," he proposed. "I want to 
show you a typical Jewish town of the Pale." 

As we went along, I asked the meaning of the 
red, white, and blue cord that edged his shoulder- 
straps. 

"That means I am a volunteer — exempt from com- 
pulsory service. The Russian word for 'volunteer,'" 
he answered the question with a grin, "is 'Volnoopre- 
dielyayoustchemusia. ' " 

169 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

We gave up all hopes of learning the lan- 
guage. . . . 

I can never forget Rovno, the Jewish town of 
the Pale of Settlement. It was Russian in its shabby- 
largeness, wide streets half paved with cobbles, di- 
lapidated sidewalks, rambling wooden houses orna- 
mented with scroll-saw trimmings painted bright 
green, and the swarming uniforms of its minor offi- 
cialdom. Tiny-wheeled cabs abounded, with their 
heavy Russian yoke, driven by hairy degenerates who 
wore tattered velveteen robes and bell-top hats of 
outrageous shape. But all the rest was Jewish. . . . 
The street was heaped with evil-smelling rubbish, 
amid slimy puddles splashed up by every passing 
conveyance. Clouds of bloated flies buzzed about. 
On both sides a multitude of little shops strangled 
each other, and their glaring signs, daubed with por- 
traits of the articles for sale, made a crazy-quilt up 
and down as far as one could see. The greasy propri- 
etors stood in their reeking doorways, each one bawling 
to us to buy from him, and not from his cheating com- 
petitor across the way. Too many shops, too many 
cab-drivers, barbers, tailors, herded into this narrow 
world where alone Jews are allowed to live in Russia; 
and periodically augmented with the miserable throngs 
cleared out from the forbidden cities, where they have 
bribed the police to stay. In the Pale a Jew gasps 
for breath indeed. 

How different these were from even the poorest, 
meanest Jews in Galician cities. Here they were a 

170 



AN OPTIMISTIC PILGRIMAGE 

pale, stooping, inbred race, refined to the point of 
idiocy. Cringing men with their "sacred fringes" 
showing under their long coats — it was at Rovno that 
we first noticed the little peaked caps worn by Polish 
Jews — faintly bearded boys with unhealthy faces, 
girls prematurely aged with bitter work and eternal 
humiliation, grown women wrinkled and bent, in 
wigs and slovenly mother hubbards. People who 
smiled deprecatingly and hatefully when you looked 
at them, who stepped into the street to let Gentiles 
pass. And in the very centre of it all, a Russian church 
with blue incense pouring out the open door, a glitter 
of gold, jewels, and candle-lighted ikons within, priests 
in stoles heavy with woven gold threads, atremble 
with slow, noble chanting. 

For a thousand years the Russians and their 
Church have done their best to exterminate the Jews 
and their religion. With what success? Here in 
Rovno were thousands of Jews shut in an impregnable 
world of their own, scrupulously observing a religion 
incessantly purified, practising their own customs, 
speaking their own language, with two codes of morals 
— one for each other and the other for the Gentiles. 
Persecution has only engendered a poison and a 
running sore in the body of the Russian people. It 
is true what Miroshnikov said, as we drank kvass in 
a little Jewish bar — that all Jews were traitors to 
Russia. Of course they are. 

An officer whom we had met on the train came 
in. He sniffed the air, bowed to us, and staring ma- 

171 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

levolently at the frightened girls who served, said dis- 
tinctly: "The dirty Jews! I detest them!" and 
walked out. 

We were around Rovno station almost all day 
long, but it was not until evening that the police de- 
cided to arrest us. Among others we appealed to a 
pompous colonel, named Bolatov, whom we had en- 
countered several times in the course of our travels. 
He was covered with high decorations, carried a gold 
honor sword, and had padding in his chest and dye 
on his ferocious mustache. We never could discover 
what he did on his leisurely peregrinations around 
the country. Miroshnikov told him that Robinson 
was a celebrated artist. 

"We shall see!" said Bolatov cunningly. He 
approached Robinson. "If you are an artist," said 
he, "please draw my portrait." 

He struck a martial attitude under the arc-light, 
chest expanded, hand on sword-hilt, and mustache 
twisted up, while Robinson drew for his life. The 
portrait was an outrageous flattery. Colonel Bolatov 
glanced at it with perfect satisfaction. He waved to 
the police. 

"Release these gentlemen," he ordered loftily. 
"They are well-known journalists. . . . Would you 
mind signing this sketch?" 

That night we slept on the benches of a troop- 
transport car; changed and waited seven hours at 
Kovel, and boarded a train bound eventually for 

172 




"But you are not tinder guard!" 





{i/>. CLS- 



CHOLM. 



AN OPTIMISTIC PILGRIMAGE 

Cholm, though no one knew when it would get there. 
All afternoon we crawled slowly westward through 
the great Polish plain — vast wheat-fields edged with 
a foam of red poppies, breaking like a yellow sea 
against cloudy promontories of trees, and archipela- 
goes of cheerful thatched villages. Half smothered in 
mighty blooming locusts were wooden stations where 
hospitable samovars steamed, and slow-moving, heavy- 
faced peasants stared motionless at the train — the men 
in long gray coats of coarse wool, the women gay with 
bright-colored skirts and kerchiefs. And late in the 
day, when the low sun inundated the flat world with 
rich mellow light, and all the red, green, and yellow 
glowed vividly luminous, we whistled through a sandy 
pine wood, and saw before us the tree-covered hill 
of Cholm, with its cluster of shining Greek cupolas 
floating like golden bubbles above the green foliage. 

A new-found but already intimate friend named 
Captain Martinev was criticising the army with true 
Russian candidness. 

" — horrible waste," said he. "Let me tell you 
a story. In October I was with my regiment in Tilsit 
when the German drive on Warsaw began, and we 
received urgent orders to hurry to Poland. Well, 
from Tilsit to the nearest railroad station, Mittau, 
is a hundred versts. We did it in three days forced 
marches, arriving in bad shape. Something had gone 
wrong — we had to wait twenty-four hours on the 
platform, without sleep, for it was very cold. By 
train we travelled two days to Warsaw, almost starv- 

i73 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

ing; no one had made arrangements for feeding us. 
When we arrived Lodz had already fallen. We got in 
at night and were marched across the city to another 
train bound for Teresa, where they were fighting. A 
little way out the tracks had been smashed by a shell; 
we detrained in the rain at two o'clock in the morning, 
and marched five hours to Teresa. 

"At eight o'clock we reached the headquarters 

of the division commanded by General M , who 

made such frightful mistakes in Manchuria. Our 
men's feet were in terrible condition; they had had 
practically no sleep for three nights, and hardly any 
food at all for two days. . . . Half an hour after we 
had thrown ourselves down exhausted in the rain, 
the general came out with his chief of staff. 

" 'How many men have I here?' he asked surlily. 

" 'Eight thousand.' 

" ' Good. Send them to relieve the trenches.' 

"Our colonel protested. 'But my men cannot 
go into the trenches. They must have rest and food. 
For five days ' 

"'Never mind!' snapped the general. 'I don't 
want your opinion. March ! ' 

"The general went back to bed. We coaxed, 
pleaded, threatened, flogged — it was terrible to hear 
them beg for food and sleep — and the column stag- 
gered off to the forward trenches. . . . 

"We went in at ten in the morning and stood 
particularly heavy fire all day — so heavy that the 
cook-wagons couldn't reach us until midnight, so 

i74 



AN OPTIMISTIC PILGRIMAGE 

there was nothing to eat. The Germans attacked 
twice in the night, so there was no sleep. Next morn- 
ing heavy artillery bombarded us. The men reeled 
as if they were drunk, forgot to take any precautions, 
and went to sleep while they were shooting. The 
officers, with blazing eyes, muttering things like men 
walking in their sleep, went up and down beating the 
soldiers with the flat of their swords. ... I forgot 
what I was doing, and so did everybody, I think; 
indeed, I can't remember what followed at all — but 
we were in there for four days and four nights. Once 
a night the cook-wagons brought soup and bread. 
At least three times a night the Germans attacked 
at the point of the bayonet. We retired from trench 
to trench, turning like beasts at bay — though we 
were all out of our heads. . . . 

"Finally on the fifth morning they relieved us. 
Out of eight thousand men two thousand came back, 
and twelve hundred of those went to the hospital. 

"But the amusing thing about it was that all 
the time we were being butchered out there, there 
were six fresh regiments held in reserve two miles 

away ! What on earth do you suppose General M 

was thinking of?" 



i75 



ARREST A LA RUSSE 

"/^HOLM!" said Martinev, nodding at the win- 
V>^ dow: "Next station." Somewhere among those 
crowded roofs and spires was the headquarters of Gen- 
eral Ivanov, commander-in-chief of all the southwest- 
ern Russian armies, next in power to the Grand Duke 
Nicolai Nicolaievitch himself. At last here was a man 
with authority to let us visit the front. As we rattled 
in our cab through the twilight streets of Cholm, Rob- 
inson and I had a violent argument about the kind 
of battle we wanted to see; Robinson hankered for an 
infantry charge, and I stuck out for a ride with raid- 
ing Cossacks. 

The sentry at Staff headquarters said that every 
one had gone for the night. 

"Loutche gostinnitza !" we told the driver. Me- 
chanically we looked for the Hotel Bristol, which is 
to be found in every city, town, and village of the 
Continent of Europe— but it had suffered the common 
decline of Hotel Bristols. The best gostinnitza turned 
out to be a three-story, lath-and-plaster structure 
half-way down a steep street in the crowded Jewish 
quarter, with a sign in Russian: "English Hotel." 
Of course, no one spoke English there — no English- 
speaking guest had ever visited the place. But a 
black-mustached little Pole, who bounced perspiring 

176 



ARREST A LA RUSSE 

to answer the "Nofnemoi!" of impatient guests, 
knew two phrases of French: "Tres jolie" and "tout 
de suite"; and the Hashein or house-master — a Jew 
of course — spoke Yiddish. 

As we were dressing next morning appeared an 
officer with a shaven head, and asked us politely to 
accompany him to the Staff. No less than four per- 
sons, he said, had heard us speak German and re- 
ported the presence of spies at Cholm. We were 
ushered into a room where, at a small table, sat a 
pleasant-faced man who smilingly shook hands and 
spoke French. We gave him the passes and a card 
of introduction from Prince Troubetskoi. 

"The governor-general of Galicia advised us to 
come here and ask General Ivanov for permission to 
go to the front." 

He nodded genially. "Very good. But we must 
first telegraph the Grand Duke — a mere formality, 
you know. We'll have an answer in two or three 
hours at the most. In the meanwhile, please return 
to your hotel and wait there." 

Our room was on the third floor, up under the 
roof, with a sloping ceiling and two dormer windows 
overlooking the naked, filthy dooryard of a Jewish 
house. Beyond were shabby, patched tin roofs of 
the huddled Jewish town, and rising over them the 
heavily wooded hill, crowned with the towers and 
golden domes of the monastery. A cobbled street on 
the right led up the hill to the gates of the monastery 
park, between wretched huts and tall tenements 

177 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

swarming with Jews. To the left the view soared 
over housetops to wide-flung plains that stretched 
forever north — patches of deep woods, fields, villages, 
and nearby, the railroad yards alive with shuttling 
trains. 

We waited all day, but no one came. Before 
we were up next morning the bald-headed officer en- 
tered, bowing. 

"The Grand Duke has not yet answered," he 
said evasively; "but doubtless he will in the course 
of the day — or maybe to-morrow." 

"Maybe to-morrow!" we cried together. "I 
thought it was a matter of two or three hours ! " 

He looked everywhere but at us. "His Highness 
is very busy " 

"Can't his Highness spare a few minutes from 
planning retreats to attend to our case?" 

"Have patience, gentlemen," said the officer 
hastily and uncomfortably. "It is only a matter of 
an hour or so now. I promise you that there will be 
no delay. . . . And now I am ordered to ask you to 
give me all your papers — of whatever nature." 

Were we suspected of being spies? He laughed 
uneasily and answered no, as he made out a receipt. 

"And now," said he, "I shall have to demand 
your word of honor not to leave the hotel until the 
answer comes." 

"Are we under arrest?" 

"Oh dear, no. You are perfectly free. But this 
is an important military post, you understand — " 

178 



ARREST A LA RUSSE 

Muttering vaguely, he made off as fast as he could, 
to avoid answering any more questions. 

Fifteen minutes later the Hashein walked un- 
ceremoniously into our room with three Cossacks, big 
fellows in tall fur hats, pointed boots, long caftans 
open at the chest; in each belt a silver-worked long 
dagger hung slantwise in front, and a long, silver- 
hilted Cossack sword at the side. They stared at us 
with expressionless faces. 

"What do they want?" I asked in German. 

The Hashein smiled conciliatingly. "Only to 
look at the gentlemen. ..." 

A little later when I went down-stairs one of the 
Cossacks was pacing up and down before our door. 
He drew aside to let me pass, but leaned over the 
stair-rail, and shouted something in Russian; another, 
standing in the hall below, came forward; and from 
the street-door I saw a third peering up. 

We wrote an indignant note to General Ivanov, 
protesting against the Russian conception of "word 
of honor," and demanding a reason for such treat- 
ment. The colonel came at midnight and said that 
the Cossacks would immediately be withdrawn, with 
the general's apologies. (Next morning they had been 
withdrawn — to the bottom of the stairs, where they 
glowered at us suspiciously.) As for our detention, 
the colonel explained that that was all a very grave 
matter. We had entered the zone of military oper- 
ations without the proper passes. 

"How were we to know which passes were proper? 
179 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

They were signed by generals, and honored by Prince 
Bobrinski at Lemberg. What have we done that's 
wrong?" 

"For one thing," said he, "you have come to 
Cholm, which is forbidden to correspondents. Sec- 
ondly, you have discovered that Cholm is General 
Ivanov's headquarters, and that is a military secret." 

"But the governor's adjutant " 

"I realize," he interrupted, "that some of our 
officials have been indiscreet. There is a great scandal 
about this — all the officers who sent you along have 
been — !" He made a suggestive movement with his 
hand. "But that doesn't justify you." And he es- 
caped under a shower of argument. 

Saturday morning our friend the shaven lieuten- 
ant appeared, looking gloomier than ever. 

"I have, gentlemen, to announce to you some 
very disagreeable news," he began formally. "The 
Grand Duke has answered our telegram. He says: 
'Keep the prisoners under strict guard.' " 

"But what about our going to the front?" 

"That is all he replied." He hurried on. "So 
unfortunately you will be compelled to keep to this 
room until further orders. The guards at the door 
will attend to your wants." 

"Look here," said Robinson. "What's the mat- 
ter with your silly Grand Duke " 

"Oh — " interjected the officer, with a shocked 

face. 

180 



ARREST A LA RUSSE 

"What are you shutting us up for? Does the 
Grand Duke think we're spies?" 

"Well," he returned doubtfully, "you see, there 
are curious things, inexplicable things among your 
papers. In the first place, there is a list of names " 

We explained impatiently for the hundredth time 
that those were the names of American citizens re- 
ported to be caught by the war in the parts of Bucovina 
and Galicia held by the Russians, and that the Amer- 
ican minister in Bucarest had given us the list to in- 
vestigate. 

The officer looked sympathetic but uncompre- 
hending. "But many of them are Jewish names." 

"But they are American citizens." 

"Ah !" said he. "Do you mean to say that Jews 
are American citizens?" We affirmed this extraor- 
dinary fact, and he didn't contradict us — but you 
could see he didn't believe it. 

Then he gave his orders. We were not to leave 
the room under any circumstances. 

"Can we walk up and down the hall?" 

"I am sorry," — he shrugged his shoulders. 

"This is absurd," I said. "What is the charge 
against us? I demand that we be allowed to tele- 
graph our ambassadors." 

He scratched his head vaguely and went out, 
muttering that he would ask his chief. Two Cossacks 
immediately mounted the stairs and began to pace 
up and down in the little hall outside our door; an- 
other one stood on the landing below; a fourth at 

181 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the front door; and the fifth man mounted a shed in 
the yard of the Jewish house, three stories sheer drop 
below, and fixed his stolid gaze upon our window. 

After consultation, Robinson and I sat down and 
composed a diplomatic note to the Russian Govern- 
ment — in English, so as to give them the trouble of 
translating it— formally notifying all concerned that 
from this date we refused to pay our hotel bill. Sum- 
moning a Cossack, we told him to take it to the 
Staff. 

It was now about noon. Over the wide Polish 
plain the June sun swam slowly up, beating down on 
the sloping tin roof immediately over our heads. In- 
conceivable odors rose from the teeming filth of the 
Jewish quarter, converging at our window. We 
stripped, garment by garment, and hung out of the 
window gasping for air. Word had spread abroad 
of the illustrious captives in the top floor of the "Eng- 
lish Hotel," and the Jewish family that inhabited the 
house below us swarmed out of the door, and stood 
gazing up at us; stooped, wrinkled old women with 
bleary eyes, slatternly, bewigged mothers, little 
girls; venerable old rabbis with long white beards, 
middle-aged men, thin spectacled youths, and small 
boys, all dressed alike in the curious peaked cap, and 
gabardine-like overcoat. Beyond the yard fence was 
a silent crowd of townspeople, almost all Jews too, 
staring at our window in silence. They thought we 
were captured German spies. The Russians consid- 
ered all Jews to be traitors — indeed, who wouldn't be 

182 



ARREST A LA RUSSE 

a traitor if he were a Jew in Russia ? With what deep 
emotion some of them must have looked at us, who 
heard all day the far-shaking thunder of the German's 
delivering guns ! 

That night the shaven officer returned with per- 
mission for us to telegraph our ambassadors, and 
with General Ivanov's reply to our note: he did not 
know why the Grand Duke ordered us imprisoned. 
As for the hotel bill, that would be arranged by the 
government. When we told this to the Hashein he 
went dead white. 

"If the Russian army pays," he cried, "I shall 
not then ever be paid ! " 

Meanwhile the telegrams disappeared into the 
vast unknown, and for eight days no answer came. 
For eight days we inhabited that malodorous chamber 
under the hot tin roof. It measured four strides wide 
by five across. We had no books except a Russian- 
French dictionary and the " Jar din de Supplice" 
which exhausted their charm after the sixth perusal. 
Along about the fifth day the Hashein discovered 
somewhere in the town a pack of cards, and we played 
double-dummy bridge until even now I shriek at the 
sight of a card. Robinson designed me a town house 
and a country house to while away the time; he de- 
signed luxurious city residences for the Cossacks; he 
drew their portraits. I wrote verses; elaborated im- 
possible plans of escape; planned a novel. We flirted 
from the window with the cook of the Jewish house 

183 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

below; we made speeches to the townspeople gathered 
in the street; we screamed curses to the surrounding 
air, and sang ribald songs; we walked up and down; 
we slept, or tried to sleep. And every day we spent 
a happy hour composing insulting communications to 
the Tzar, the Duma, the Council of Empire, the Grand 
Duke, General Ivanov and his Staff — which we forced 
a Cossack to take to headquarters. 

Early in the morning appeared the Hashein — a 
young Jew with a dark, handsome, expressionless face 
covered by a silky brown beard — followed by a sus- 
picious Cossack. 

"M or gen !"■ he would shout at us in broken Ger- 
man, as we stuck our noses out of the bedclothes. 
"Was wollen sie essen heute?" 

"What can we have?" we would invariably re- 
ply. 

"Spiegeleier — biftek — hartojfeln — schnitzel — brot — 

butter — chai" 

Day after day we took the Russian-French dic- 
tionary, and labored with him to change the diet; but 
he could not read Russian, and refused to understand 
it when we pronounced the words. So we alternated 
between eggs, tough steak, and veal, with always 
the eternal tea at least six times a day. A samovar 
operated on the balcony below our window, and 
from time to time one of us rushed to the door, pushed 
the Cossack out of the way, leaned over the stairs 
and bellowed "Hashein!" There was a running and 
calling of anxious Cossacks, doors opened and guests 

184 



ARREST A LA RUSSE 

popped their heads out, and cries came echoing up from 
below. 

u SMo!" 

"Chai!" we bellowed. "Dva chai — skorrie!" 

We tried to have eggs for breakfast, but the 
Hashein refused. "Eggs for lunch, eggs for dinner, 
but no eggs for breakfast," he announced calmly: 
"Eggs for breakfast are very unhealthy." 

Once after an hour's labor I made him under- 
stand that we wanted bacon with our eggs. He threw 
up his hands in horror. "Bacon!" said he. "Yes, it 
can be procured; but only Gentiles eat bacon. I 
shall not give you bacon." 



185 



PRISON LIFE IN CHOLM 

ASOTNIA of Kubanski Cossacks in reserve at 
Cholm had nothing to do but exercise their 
horses and stand guard over us. A hundred half-sav- 
age giants, dressed in the ancient panoply of that curi- 
ous Slavic people whose main business is war, and who 
serve the Tzar in battle from their fifteenth to their 
sixtieth year; high fur hats, long caftans laced in at 
the waist and colored dull pink or blue or green, with 
slanting cartridge pockets on each breast, curved 
yataghans inlaid with gold and silver, daggers hilted 
with uncut gems, and boots with sharp toes turned 
up. At first, guarding prisoners was an amusing 
novelty to them. By day those who knew us brought 
their friends to look us over; and at intervals in the 
night, the ones who hadn't been able to come during 
the day stamped noisily into the room, lit the lamp, 
and poked us awake with their scabbards. 

They were like overgrown children. Some came 
on guard nervously clasping their sword-hilts, and 
backed cautiously out again, so that we should not 
get behind them. Others were shy and trusting — eager 
to make friends; for hours they would pore over the 
French-Russian dictionary, spelling out their life his- 
tories. One friendly Cossack, in particular, spent 
most of his time with Robinson, both painfully boast- 
ing about their homes and their children. In that 

186 



PRISON LIFE IN CHOLM 

eight days we received the entire sotnia several times. 
They got their portraits drawn, overhauled our outfit 
with ceaseless curiosity, felt the material of our clothes, 
smoked our cigarettes, marvelled at the pictures Rob- 
inson drew of the New York sky-line, and argued in- 
terminably among themselves as to whether or not 
we were German spies. None of them had ever been 
to western Europe before, and they didn't know what 
to make of it. 

The majority were like that — whether we were 
German or not made no difference to them — but one 
thin, evil-faced youth with a blond mustache treated 
us like captives of a hated enemy. When he was on 
duty he clumped noisily into the room without knock- 
ing, helped himself to cigarettes, and took any money 
he saw lying around. Sometimes when I was reading 
he jerked the book out of my hand. We remon- 
strated with Ivan; we told him in plain English to 
cut it out. He responded insolently in Russian. And 
this went on for several days. 

One day Ivan entered, swaggered insolently to 
the table and took a handful of cigarettes — and then 
spat on the floor. "Get out, Ivan!" shouted Robin- 
son. Ivan sneered in Russian. "Get out, or we'll 
put you out!" 

The Cossack had his back to me, and the door 
was open. I took him suddenly around the waist 
from the rear, and running him to the head of the 
stairs, gave him a push. In a clatter of scimitars and 
daggers he rolled down a long flight of stairs; and 

187 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

rising at the bottom drew his weapons with a roar 
of rage and came charging up. Robinson and I held 
the door. Ivan thrust his sabre through the crack 
and waved it around, bellowing wrathfully. But the 
Cossacks on the landing simply leaned against the 
wall and shouted with laughter; so finally Ivan went 
away, and he never came back again. . . . 

Three times a day the Cossacks rode their horses 
down the steep street, around the hotel and out the 
street to the left, and as they rode they sang a great, 
lifting, roaring chant, like a stern old hymn. We al- 
ways leaned from the window as they passed, and 
when they came under us every man looked up and 
grinned, and raised his hand to salute — all except 
Ivan, who made a ferocious grimace and shook his 
fist at us; whereat we leaned down and shook our fists 
at him. 

Sometimes in the breathless evening, when the 
Cossack in the yard below had got tired of watching 
and slipped off for a drink, we would climb out of our 
window onto the steep peaked roof and look down 
on the tin roofs and teeming overcrowded streets of 
the town. Southward on the hill were the two an- 
cient spires of the grand old Catholic church, rem- 
nant of the days of glory when John Poniatowski 
was King of Poland. Down on a dark side street was 
the squat, unmarked building that held the Jewish 
synagogue and the heder — the Jewish sacred school — 
and from this building ascended day and night the 
whining drone of boys chanting the sacred books, and 



PRISON LIFE IN CHOLM 

the deeper voices of ravs and rebbes hotly discussing 
the intricate questions of the law. The tide of Russia 
was rising and overflowing this city of old Poland. 
We could see from our roofs colossal military barracks 
and institutions — immense buildings with facades a 
quarter of a mile long, as they are in Petrograd; and 
eight churches building or completed lifted grotesque 
onion-shaped towers into the air, colored red and 
blue, or patterned in gay lozenges. Directly before 
our window was the Holy Hill. Above a rich mass of 
green trees six golden bulbs rose from the fantastic 
towers of the monastery, and at evening and on Sun- 
day deep-toned and tinkly bells galloped and boomed. 
Morning and night we watched the priests going up 
and down the street — fanatic-faced men with beards 
and long curly hair falling upon their shoulders, dressed 
in gray or black silk coats falling to their feet. And 
the Jews on the sidewalk stepped submissively out 
of their way. Now the monastery was a military 
hospital. Groups of girls in the lovely white head- 
dress of the Russian Red Cross hurried in and out of 
the great gates where two soldiers always stood guard; 
and there was always a silent knot of people peering 
curiously through the iron fence. Occasionally a 
wide-open yelling siren could be heard rising and 
deepening out of the distance, and presently an auto- 
mobile would rush furiously up the steep street, full 
of wounded officers. Once it was a big open machine, 
in which the body of a huge man writhed in the grip 
of four nurses who were trying to hold him down. 

189 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Where his stomach had been was a raw mass of blood 
and rags, and he screamed awfully all the way up the 
hill, until the trees swallowed the automobile and his 
screams simultaneously. 

During the day the uproar of the teeming town 
obscured all other sound. But at night we could hear, 
or rather feel, the shocking thunder of the enemy's 
guns less than twenty miles away. 

Immediately under our eyes was enacted every 
day the drama of Jewish life in Russia. Our Cossack 
guard paraded superciliously about the yard of the 
house below, the children making wide detours as 
they passed him, the young girls bringing him glasses 
of tea and trying to smile at his coarse familiarities, 
the old people stopping politely to talk with him and 
casting looks of hate at him behind his back. He 
strutted about like a lord, he the humblest slave of 
the Russian military machine; they cringed and 
curried favor with the member of the dominant race. 
We noticed that every two or three days all the Jews, 
young and old, wore upon their breasts a little paper 
medallion. One morning the Hashein came to our 
room with one: it was a cheap electrogravure of the 
Tzar's daughter, the Grand Duchess Tatiana. 

"What is that?" I asked him, pointing to it. 

He shrugged his shoulders in a bitter kind of 
way. "It is the Grand Duchess's birthday," he said. 

"But I have seen the people wearing it already 
twice this week." 

190 




A KUBANSKI COSSACK. 



PRISON LIFE IN CHOLM 

"Every two or three days," he answered, "is 
the Grand Duchess's birthday. At least that is what 
the Cossacks say. The Cossacks make every Jew 
buy a picture of the Grand Duchess on her birthday 
and wear it. It costs five roubles. We are only poor 
Jews, too ignorant to know what day is the Grand 
Duchess's birthday. But the Cossacks are Russians, 
and they know." 

"What if you refuse to buy it?" I asked. 

He drew his finger significantly across his throat 
and made a gurgling noise. 

It was a filthy place, that yard, full of the refuse 
of two Jewish houses and whatever the hotel guests 
threw out of their windows. A high board fence sep- 
arated it from the street, with great wooden gates 
closed by a strong bar. The door and the lower win- 
dows of the house were also protected by heavy wooden 
shutters fastened from the inside. These were for de- 
fense against pogroms. Against the fence a slanting 
platform of planks had been erected, where all day 
long innumerable dirty little children climbed up and 
slid down, shrieking with laughter, or lay on their 
stomachs with their noses over the fence to watch 
the Cossacks ride by. Babies wailed and sprawled 
in the mud of the yard. From the open doors and win- 
dows ascended the odors of perpetual "kosher" cook- 
ing, the intimate smells of people too overcrowded 
and too poor to keep clean — the kind you meet on 
the lower East Side. 

191 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

But every Friday at noon the house was all of a 
bustle, as was every Jewish house in the town, prepar- 
ing for the Sabbath. All the women put on their 
oldest working clothes; slops were emptied into the 
yard, and a tin tub of steaming water stood on the 
door-step, out of which bucketfuls were carried inside, 
whence came sounds of scrubbing, sweeping, the slap 
of wet mops, and the rhythmic songs of Jewish women 
at work. The buckets, now full of dirty water, were 
poured back in the tin tub, and after its contents 
had become brown and thick like soup, all the family 
receptacles were brought — pans, crockery, knives and 
forks, cups and glasses — and washed there. The foun- 
tain was too far away to waste water. And after that 
the children each filled a bucket from the tub and 
went in to bathe, while the rest scoured the door- 
jambs and the window-sills and the two stone steps 
below the door, swaying in unison to a minor chant. 

The linen hanging on the clothes-line was taken 
in. A feeling of joy and release was abroad; the 
terrorized gloom of week-days seemed to lift. All the 
little Jewish shops closed early, and the men came 
home walking in little friendly knots like people whose 
work is done. Each put on his best long coat and 
peaked cap, his most shiny boots, and went out to 
join the ever- thickening steady stream of sober, black- 
robed people that flowed toward the synagogue. 

In the house the dirty carpets were rolled up to 
reveal the white floor, which is always covered except 
on the Sabbath, and on the days of great religious 

192 



PRISON LIFE IN CHOLM 

feasts. And one by one the women, girls, and little 
children came laughing and chattering out of the 
purified house in their best clothes, and went out on 
the street, where all the other women and children 
were gathered, to gossip together and show off their 
finery. 

From our window we could see a corner of the 
kitchen, with the wrinkled old dowager of the house 
superintending the sealing of the oven; could hear 
the jangling of the keys being put out of sight for the 
Holy Day, and look full upon the dining-room table 
with its row of candles lit for Candle Prayer, and the 
Sabbath loaf covered with its doily, the wine flask, 
and kiddush cup. 

The men came slowly home from synagogue, and 
up and down the street, in animated conversation, 
strolled the pale, super-refined young Jewish intel- 
lectuals, arguing delicate points of the Law as the 
dusk came down. The family stood silent, thick- 
clustered, with bowed heads hiding the table, while 
blessing over the wine was said, and the consecrated 
loaf cut — the yellow candle-light striking up along 
their olive skins, and the strange sharp ridges of their 
Oriental faces. . . . After supper the children played 
quietly, stiffly in their Sabbath clothes, and the women 
gathered in front of the houses; as the darkness grew, 
from every window of a Jewish house a fight beamed, 
to show the wayfarer that the spirit of God brooded 
over that roof. And we could look into the windows 
of a long, bare room on the second story, empty dur- 

i93 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

ing the week, where the men-folks gathered with great 
books spread out before them on the table, and sang 
together deep-toned, Oriental-sounding psalms until 
late into the night. 

On the Sabbath the men went in the morning to 
the synagogue. It was a day of much visiting between 
houses in Sabbath clothes; of an interminable dinner 
that lasted the greater part of the afternoon, with 
gay songs sung by the whole family to clapping of 
hands; of dressed-up families, down to the last baby, 
straggling along the road that led around the base 
of the Holy Hill toward the open country. . . . And 
then night and the unsealing of the oven, the putting 
down of the carpets, little Yakub repeating his lessons 
to his teacher in a singsong wail, the opening of the 
shops, old clothes again, dirt, and terror. 

Every day or so a tragic little procession would 
pass up the street that led to the prison beyond the 
monastery: two or three Jews in their characteristic 
long coats and peaked caps, shuffling along with ex- 
pressionless faces and dejected drooping shoulders, pre- 
ceded and followed by a great shambling soldier with 
a bayoneted rifle in the hollow of his arm. Many 
times we asked the Hashein about these people; but 
he always professed ignorance. Where were they 
going? "To Siberia," he would mumble, "or per- 
haps — " and he would gesture the pulling of a trigger. 
The Hashein was an extremely prudent person. But 
sometimes he stood for a long time in our room, look- 
ing from Robinson to me and back again, as if there 

194 



PRISON LIFE IN CHOLM 

was much to say if only he dared. Finally he shook 
his head, sighed, and went out past the watchful Cos- 
sack, devoutly touching the paper prayer nailed up at 
the door-jamb. 

Toward the end we got no answer to our ultima- 
tums, and the shaven-headed officer came no more; 
it was such a disagreeable job to answer our argu- 
ments! The Cossacks, too, found more entertaining 
business elsewhere, though they never ceased to salute 
and shout greetings as they rode past our window; 
so at last we saw only the Hashein, the Cossack on 
guard, and the two grinning and shapeless Polish 
servants — Fred and Annie — whom the Hashein under- 
fed and overworked, as a Russian Jew will a Chris- 
tian if he gets the chance. 



i95 



FURTHER ADVENTURES IN CAPTIVITY 

ONE day a postman in gaudy uniform, accompa- 
nied by several curious friends, came bowing 
and clicking into the room with a telegram from the 
American ambassador: 

"You have been arrested because you entered 
the war zone without proper authority. The Foreign 
Office notifies this embassy that you will be sent to 
Petrograd." 

That was all. Silence settled down again, and 
the outside world withdrew itself from our ken. One 
blank, monotonous day succeeded another. We were 
forgotten. 

And then several nights later, there sounded a 
jingling of spurs and a light rap at our door. Two 
officers filed solemnly in; one a stout, perspiring little 
man who introduced himself as Ivanov, quartermaster 
of the Southwestern Army and cousin of the general, 
the other a thin, bald-headed epileptic with a withered 
arm, covered with decorations — Lieutenant Potemkin. 
His body and face muscles twitching with a sort of 
St. Vitus's dance, the latter began to talk, and after 
some time we discovered he was speaking an obscure 
dialect of English. The drift of his remarks was, that 
we were free. 

"May we return to Bucarest?" 
196 



FURTHER ADVENTURES IN CAPTIVITY 

"Yes, gentlemans." 

"How can we get to the front?" 

"What does he say, what does he say?" queried 
the quartermaster in a squeaking voice. The lieuten- 
ant translated, and they both fell to laughing up- 
roariously. 

"I should advise you," said the lieutenant, stut- 
tering — he was like a speaking skeleton — "I should 
advise you to go Petrograd inquiring your ambas- 
sador the Grand Duke to petition — yes, there are 
diplomatical procedures." He nodded his head vio- 
lently. 

Robinson and I discussed the matter; perhaps 
if we went to Petrograd, we might yet reach the Rus- 
sian front. 

"If you will come quarter-general your effect 
documentaries are given," continued the lieutenant 
fluently. We accompanied him then and there, and 
he returned to us passports, letters, passes, and the 
doubtful list of Jewish citizens. We demanded a pass 
to Petrograd, so that we would not be arrested. He 
said it was not necessary; that no one would arrest 
us; however, upon our insisting, he made one out. 
And it was lucky he did, for we were arrested at least 
twenty times. 

Mr. George T. Marye, the American ambassador, 
was at lunch in the hotel when I got there; a precise 
little man with glasses and a white mustache. 

"Mr. Reed," he said in a dry, quavering voice, 
197 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"I am very glad to see you in Petrograd. You have 
given this office a great deal of anxiety — a great deal. 
Now, Mr. Reed, I do not want to insist upon your 
misdemeanors, but my best advice is for you to leave 
Russia immediately by the shortest route." 

"Leave Russia!" said I with considerable as- 
tonishment: "What for?" 

"Why," he answered testily, "it should be per- 
fectly evident. You have been sent here under mili- 
tary guard " 

"Not at all," I answered. "We were released and 
told that we could return to Bucarest." 

"Bucarest !" said he incredulously, "but I am in- 
formed by the Foreign Office that you were to be sent 
here under arrest, and expelled from Russia. If this 
is not so, I should advise you to leave the country 
as fast as possible." 

"But what have I done?" 

"The despatches which I have received from the 
Foreign Office concerning you, Mr. Reed, are very 
alarming — very alarming indeed. The officers who 
examined you at the front claim to have found upon 
your person a false passport and letters of introduc- 
tion to leaders of Jewish anti-Russian revolutionary 
societies. Moreover, you entered the Russian mili- 
tary zone without proper credentials." 

"But my passport was issued in Washington," I 
replied, "and I had no letters to Jews of any party. 
All my papers were returned to me at Cholm — I have 
them here, if you want to see them. As for entering 

198 



FURTHER ADVENTURES IN CAPTIVITY 

the army zone without credentials, I have passes from 
two Russian generals, the governor-general of Galicia, 
a letter from Prince Troubetskoi, and a commission 
from the American minister at Bucarest." 

Mr. Marye gave me a look of utter unbelief. 
"Well, Mr. Reed," he said coldly, "your statement 
certainly does not agree with that of the Russian 
Government." 

What happened was this: The officers who arrested 
us at Cholm were very much embarrassed when they 
saw our passes. Recently, also, German spies had 
done effective work in that region, and they had suf- 
fered for it. They felt that they simply must catch 
some German spies. We were the goats. The list of 
Jewish- American citizens looked suspicious to the man 
who examined our papers; and besides, not understand- 
ing English, he couldn't read the documents. Perhaps, 
too, the staff at Cholm felt that they had been over- 
zealous, and were afraid that they might be repri- 
manded for imprisoning an Englishman and an Ameri- 
can. So some one invented these wild accusations and 
sent them to the Grand Duke, hoping that we would 
be done away with. That is how the Russian mind 
works. 

As a matter of fact, we found out afterward that 
it had been decided to have us shot at Cholm. But 
the American and British ambassadors had insisted 
that we be sent to Petrograd. 

I went to the American embassy next day to see 
199 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

what could be done. The first secretary intimated 
that I was a liar — since my statement and that of the 
Foreign Office did not agree. 

"I understand," he said, "that you are to be ex- 
pelled by way of Stockholm or Vladivostok. Mean- 
while you had better remain quietly at your hotel." 

"But the ambassador advised me to leave the 
country." 

"Do not attempt to leave," said he emphatically, 
"on any account." 

"But I must return to Bucarest!" I exclaimed. 
"Is this embassy going to allow me to be expelled by 
Stockholm or Vladivostok on false charges?" 

He answered frigidly that the embassy could do 
nothing. 

At the British embassy, where I went with Rob- 
inson, the first secretary simply laughed. "Why, that 
is perfectly ridiculous!" he said. "Of course they 
can't expel you from Russia ! Write your story, and 
we will act upon the facts as you state them. If Mr. 
Reed wants us to, we'll be glad to include him also." 

In two hours a note from the British ambassador 
was on its way to the Foreign Office, indorsing our 
credentials, and guaranteeing that our motives were 
innocent. A day or so later I again saw Mr. Marye in 
the lobby of the hotel. 

"What, Mr. Reed," he said sternly, "haven't you 

left Russia yet ? " 

200 



FURTHER ADVENTURES IN CAPTIVITY 

"Your first secretary ordered me on no account 
to leave." 

"Ah! did he?" said the ambassador uncertainly. 
"But I should like to see you out of the country, Mr. 
Reed — your case is a great worry to me!" 

In Russia the mills of God grind slowly, and 
they grind exceeding strange. Three weeks later, out 
of the clear sky came a communication to the two 
embassies: that Messrs. Reed and Robinson were at 
liberty to remain in Russia as long as they liked, but 
that when they departed they must leave the coun- 
try by the port of Vladivostok. 

"Nothing can be done — nothing," said Mr. Marye. 
"But I will have a talk with Mr. Sasonov." 

The secretary of the British embassy was highly 
indignant. "Don't you go a step," he said. "The 
ambassador himself will protest to Mr. Sasonov im- 
mediately." 

Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, 
treated the whole matter as a joke. That afternoon 
he was talking with the Russian Minister of Foreign 
Affairs. 

"I think you people are very short-sighted," 
said Sir George. "These men have done invaluable 
service in the American press for the Allies, and they 
came to Russia to write about affairs here in a friendly 
way. You will simply create bad feeling against Rus- 
sia in America." 

201 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"Just the same," said Sasonov, "they were very 
naive to enter Russia the way they did." 

"Not any more naive than your own military 
authorities," retorted Sir George. 

A week later Mr. Marye met me in the lobby 
and shook me warmly by the hand. 

"Well, Mr. Reed," said he, smiling, "how is 
your matter going on?" 

"I thought you were attending to my matter, 
Mr. Marye," I answered. "Haven't you spoken with 
Mr. Sasonov?" 

"I had a friendly conversation with Mr. Sasonov, 
who assured me that nothing could be done. Re- 
member, Mr. Reed, it is not my fault if you get into 
difficulties. You recollect that I advised you frankly 
to leave Russia at once, and I advise you now to do 
so — by Vladivostok." 

Ten days later we tried to escape. With a dona- 
tion of thirty-five roubles the Petrograd police were 
persuaded to stamp our passports with the official 
"Free to cross the frontier"; and we left very sud- 
denly one evening, changing cabs several times, and 
took the train for Kiev and Bucarest. But next morn- 
ing, at Vilna, a smiling officer of gendarmerie came 
into our compartment and woke us up. 

"A thousand pardons!" said he, without asking 
who we were or where we were going. "I am ordered 
by telegraph to ask you to leave the train here and 

,202 



FURTHER ADVENTURES IN CAPTIVITY 

return to Petrograd, and to leave Russia immediately 
by way of Vladivostok." 

It took a day and a half to get back to Petrograd. 
No sooner were we in our hotel than two officers of 
the secret police materialized and notified us to go 
to headquarters and interview the chief. 

Strangely enough, nothing was known there of 
our attempted flight. The chief, a sullen, bloated 
person with an evil face, read us the order which had 
just been received direct from his Highness the Grand 
Duke. It was dated three days before — a day before 
our escape — and said: "Mr. Boardman Robinson, Brit- 
ish subject, and Mr. John Reed, American citizen, are 
herewith commanded to leave Petrograd for Vladi- 
vostok within twenty-four hours of the receipt of 
this; in case of non-compliance they are to be de- 
livered to a military court martial and severely 
punished." 

"Severely punished?" asked Robinson. "What 
if we are acquitted?" 

"You will be severely punished," answered the 
chief woodenly. 

In the meantime our interpreter looked up the 
train schedule; there was no train in the direction 
of Vladivostok within the twenty-four hours! Be- 
sides, our money had given out. All that didn't make 
any difference to the chief; he insisted that we must 
go, train or no train, money or no money. 

Pursued by flocks of detectives in all sorts of dis- 
guises, we scurried to our respective embassies. 

203 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Mr. Marye refused to see me, but sent Mr. White, 
the second secretary. 

"We cannot help you financially, Mr. Reed," he 
said coldly, "but the American consul, I believe, has 
a fund for destitute Americans." 

In desperation I explained that we were ordered 
to leave for Vladivostok within twenty-four hours, and 
that there was no train. He replied indifferently that 
it was very doubtful if anything could be done. So I 
hurried to find Robinson. 

Thank God, the British embassy had acted for us 
both. His Excellency the ambassador wired the Brit- 
ish attache on the staff of the Grand Duke to speak 
with his Highness. Moreover, Sir George went in 
person to the Foreign Office and protested in the name 
of his government. The secretary of foreign affairs 
telegraphed the Grand Duke, asking that the order be 
revoked; and over the telephone instructed the secret 
police to stop annoying us. 

An hour later the chief of police telephoned us his 
apologies and said that his men had been withdrawn. 

Next day a Staff officer called at our hotel, and 
with respectful politeness presented a note from the 
Grand Duke's adjutant, stating that the order of ex- 
pulsion was cancelled, and that we were at liberty to 
proceed to Bucarest when we wished. 

We didn't wait, but took the next fast train south, 
fearing that perhaps some one might change his mind. 
The officer in command of the frontier put us in a 

204 



FURTHER ADVENTURES IN CAPTIVITY 

corner of the station, and set four soldiers on us, who 
prodded our baggage inch by inch, ripped our wallets 
apart and the lining of our clothes, and virtually un- 
dressed us before the other passengers. All my papers 
and notes they confiscated, and all Robinson's sketches. 
But once over the frontier, on neutral ground, that 
seemed a small price to pay for getting free of the 
clumsy clutches of the Russian Army. 



205 



THE FACE OF RUSSIA 

WHOEVER has not travelled on the broad-gauge 
Russian railways does not know the delights 
of great cars half as wide again as American cars, 
berths too long and too ample, ceilings so high that 
you can stand in the upper berth. The train takes 
its smooth-rolling, leisurely way, drawn by wood- 
burning locomotives belching sweet-smelling birch 
smoke and showers of sparks, stopping long at little 
stations where there are always good restaurants. 
At every halt boys bring trays of tea glasses through 
the train, sandwiches, sweet cakes, and cigarettes. 
There are no specified hours for arriving anywhere, 
no fixed times for eating or sleeping. Often on a 
journey I have seen the dining-car come on at mid- 
night, and everybody go in and have dinner with in- 
terminable conversation, lasting until time for break- 
fast. One man rents bedclothes from the porter, and 
disrobes in full view of the rest of the company 
in his compartment; others turn in on the bare mat- 
tresses; and the rest sit up drinking eternal chai and 
endlessly arguing. Windows are shut and doors. 
One stifles in thick cigarette smoke, and there are 
snores from the upper berth, and continual move- 
ment of persons getting up, going to bed, drifting in 
and out. 

In Russia every one talks about his soul. Almost 
206 



THE FACE OF RUSSIA 

any conversation might have been taken from the 
pages of a Dostoievsky novel. The Russians get 
drunk on their talk; voices ring, eyes flash, they are 
exalted with a passion of self-revelation. In Petro- 
grad I have seen a crowded cafe at two o'clock in the 
morning — of course no liquor was to be had — shouting 
and singing and pounding on the tables, quite in- 
toxicated with ideas. 

Outside the windows of the train the amazing 
country flows by, flat as a table; for hours the an- 
cient forest marches alongside, leagues and leagues 
of it, untouched by the axe, mysterious and sombre. 
At the edge of the trees runs a dusty track along 
which an occasional heavy cart lumbers, its rough- 
coated horse surmounted by a great wooden yoke 
from which dangles a brass bell, the driver a great- 
shouldered mujik with a brutish face overhung with 
hair. Hours apart are little thatched towns, mere 
slashings in the primeval woods, built of untrimmed 
boards around the wooden church, with its bright- 
painted cupolas, and the government vodka shop — 
closed now — easily the most pretentious building in 
the village. Wooden sidewalks on stilts, unpaved 
alley-like streets that are sloughs of mud, immense 
piles of cord-wood to burn in the engine — for all the 
world like a railroad town in the timber of the great 
Northwest. Immense women with gay-colored ker- 
chiefs around their hair and dazzling teeth, booted 
giants of men in peaked caps and whiskers, and 
priests in long, black coats and stovepipe hats with 

207 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

brims. Along the platform, tall policemen much in 
evidence, with their yellow blouses, scarlet revolver 
cords, and swords. Soldiers, of course, everywhere — 
by the tens of thousands. . . . Then great fields 
breaking suddenly from the woods and stretching to 
the far horizon, golden-heavy with wheat with black 
stumps sticking up in it. 

Russians are not patriotic like other races, I think. 
The Tsar to them is not the head of the government; 
he is a divinity. The government itself — the bu- 
reaucracy — commands no loyalty from the masses; it is 
like a separate nation imposed upon the Russian people. 
As a rule, they do not know what their flag looks like, 
and if they do it is not the symbol of Russia. And the 
Russian national hymn is a hymn, a half-mystical 
great song; but no one feels it necessary to rise and 
remove his hat when it is played. As a people, they 
have no sympathy with imperialism — they do not 
wish to make Russia a great country by conquest — 
in fact, they do not seem to realize that there is any 
world outside of Russia; that is why they fight so 
badly on an invasion of the enemy's country. But 
once let the enemy set foot on Russian soil, and the 
mujiks turn into savage beasts, as they did in 1812 
and in 191 5. Their farms, their houses, the woods and 
plains and holy cities are under the heel of the for- 
eigner; that is why they fight so well on defense. 

Russians seem to have a Greek feeling for the 
land, for the wide flat plains, the deep forests, the 
mighty rivers, the tremendous arch of sky that is 

208 



THE FACE OF RUSSIA 

over Russia, the churches incrusted with gold and 
jewels, where countless generations of their fathers 
have touched the ikons; for the tremendous impulses 
that set whole villages wandering in search of a sacred 
river, for the cruel hardness of the northern winter, 
for the fierce love and the wild gayety, and the dread- 
ful gloom, and the myths and legends which are Rus- 
sia. Once a young officer travelled with us in our 
compartment, and all day long he gazed out of the 
window at the dark woods, the vast fields, the little 
towns, and tears rolled down his cheeks. "Russia is 
a mighty mother; Russia is a mighty mother," he 
said over and over again. ... 

Another time it was a middle-aged civilian with 
a bullet head shaved close, and wide, staring, light- 
blue eyes that gave him the expression of a mystic. 

"We Russians do not know how great we are," 
he said. "We cannot grasp the idea of so many mil- 
lions of people to communicate with. We do not realize 
how much land, how much riches we have. Why, I 
can tell you of one, Mr. Yousoupov of Moscow, who 
owns more land than he knows, whose estates are 
greater than the territory of any German King. And 
no Russian realizes how many races are embraced in 
this nation; I myself know only thirty-nine. . . ." 

Yet this vast chaotic agglomeration of barbarian 
races, brutalized and tyrannized over for centuries, 
with only the barest means of intercommunication, 
without consciousness of any one ideal, has developed 
a profound national unity of feeling and thought and 

209 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

an original civilization that spreads by its own power. 
Loose and easy and strong, it invades the life of the 
far-flung savage tribes of Asia; it crosses the frontiers 
into Rumania, Galicia, East Prussia — in spite of or- 
ganized efforts to stop it. Even the English, who 
usually cling stubbornly to their way of living in all 
countries and under all conditions, are overpowered 
by Russia; the English colonies in Moscow and Petro- 
grad are half Russian. And it takes hold of the minds 
of men because it is the most comfortable, the most 
liberal way of life. Russian ideas are the most ex- 
hilarating, Russian thought the freest, Russian art 
the most exuberant; Russian food and drink are to 
me the best, and Russians themselves are, perhaps, 
the most interesting human beings that exist. 

They have a sense of space and time which fits 
them. In America we are the possessors of a great 
empire — but we live as if this were a crowded island 
like England, where our civilization came from. Our 
streets are narrow and our cities congested. We live 
in houses crushed up against one another, or in apart- 
ments, layer on layer; each family a little shut-in 
cell, self-centred and narrowly private. Russia is 
also a great empire; but there the people live as if 
they knew it were one. In Petrograd some streets 
are a quarter-mile broad and there are squares three- 
quarters of a mile across, and buildings whose facades 
run on uninterrupted for half a mile. Houses are 
always open; people are always visiting each other 
at all hours of the day and night* Food and tea and 

210 



THE FACE OF RUSSIA 

conversation flow interrninably; every one acts just 
as he feels like acting, and says just what he wants 
to. There are no particular times for getting up or 
going to bed or eating dinner, and there is no conven- 
tional way of murdering a man, or of making love. 
To most people a Dostoievsky novel reads like the 
chronicle of an insane asylum; but that, I think, is 
because the Russians are not restrained by the tradi- 
tions and conventions that rule the social conduct of 
the rest of the world. 

This is not only true of the great cities but of the 
small towns, and even the villages as well. The Rus- 
sian peasant cannot be taught to tell time by the 
clock. He is so close to the earth, so much a part of 
it, that machine-made time means nothing to him. 
But he must be regular, or his crops will not grow; 
so he ploughs and plants and reaps by rain, wind, 
snow, and the march of the seasons — and he lives 
according to the sun, moon, and stars. Once the 
peasant is driven into the cities to work in the fac- 
tories he loses the driving compulsion of nature, and 
when he has risen above the necessity of factory 
hours, there is no further reason for him to live a 
regular life. 

We saw something of life in a Russian household; 
samovars perpetually steaming, servants shuffling in 
and out with fresh water and fresh tea-leaves, laughing 
and joining in the perpetual clatter of conversation. 
In and out flowed an unbroken stream of relatives, 
friends, comparative strangers. There was always 

211 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

tea, always a long sideboard heaped with zakouska, 
always a hundred little groups telling stories, loudly 
arguing, laughing uproariously, always little parties 
of card-players. Meals occurred whenever anybody 
got hungry — or rather there was a perpetual meal 
going on. Some went to bed, others rose after a long 
sleep and had breakfast. Day and night it never 
seemed to stop. 

And in Petrograd we knew some people who 
received callers between eleven o'clock at night and 
dawn. Then they went to bed, and did not get up 
again until evening. For three years they hadn't seen 
daylight — except in the white nights of summer. 
Many interesting characters went there; among them 
an old Jew who had bought immunity from the 
police for years, and who confided to us that he had 
written a history of Russian political thought in five 
volumes; four volumes had appeared, and had been 
regularly confiscated upon publication — he was now 
engaged upon the fifth. He was always discussing 
politics in a loud voice, breaking oft" every now and 
then to look out of the window to see if there were 
any police listening. For he had been in jail once for 
speaking the word "socialism." Before he began to 
talk he would take us into a corner and in a whisper 
explain that when he said "daisy," that meant "social- 
ism"; and when he said "poppy," that meant "revolu- 
tion." And then he would go ahead, striding up and 
down the room, and shouting all sorts of destructive 
doctrines. 

212 



THE FACE OF RUSSIA 

For the Russia of melodrama and of the English 
popular magazines still exists. I remember seeing 
some prisoners on the platform of a station where our 
train stopped. They were huddled between the tracks: 
two or three young stupid-looking mujiks with cropped 
heads, a bent old man half-blind, a Jew or so, and 
some women, one a mere girl with a baby. Around 
them was a ring of police with bared swords. 

"Where are they going?" I asked the conductor. 

"Siberia," he whispered out of the corner of his 
mouth. , 

"What have they done?" 

"Don't ask questions," he snapped nervously. 
"If you ask questions in Russia that is what happens 
to you!" 

There were some preposterous war regulations 
in Petrograd. If you spoke German over the tele- 
phone you were subject to a fine of three thousand 
roubles, and if you were heard talking German on 
the street the penalty was Siberia. I have it on very 
good authority that two professors of Oriental lan- 
guages were walking down the Morskaia, speaking 
ancient Armenian to each other. They were arrested, 
and the police swore that it was German. And from 
that day to this they have never again been heard of. 

In spite of this, however, the fact remains that 
any German with money could go on living in Petro- 
grad or Moscow, and manifest his patriotism in any 
way he pleased. For instance, the large German 
colony of Moscow gave a dinner in the city's most 

213 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

fashionable hotel during November, 191 4, at which 
German songs were chanted, addresses in German 
delivered which consigned the Tsar and his allies to 
purgatory, and shouts of "Hoch der Kaiser!" rent 
the air. Nothing whatever was done about this; 
but six months later the police determined to teach 
them a lesson without appearing at all prominent — 
which would have cut off their German revenues. 
Quantities of vodka were dug up from somewhere, the 
ikons taken from the churches, and, encouraged by 
the police, the mob started out to wreck German 
houses, shops, and hotels. After the first few of these 
had been demolished the people turned their atten- 
tion to the French, English, and Russian establish- 
ments, shouting: "Down with the rich! You have 
speculated too long with our money!" Before the 
riot ended almost every great store in Moscow had 
been smashed and pillaged, and many wealthy Rus- 
sians, men and women, torn from their automobiles 
and carriages and thrown into the canal. The Russian 
people of the upper classes did not disdain to take 
advantage of the situation. They sent their footmen 
and valets down to plunge into the riot, and take 
whatever silks and laces and furs they could lay their 
hands on. ... As a consequence of this patriotic 
demonstration, the governor of the city, the governor 
of the province, and the chief of police were discharged 
from office. 

How the Germans were finally removed from 
Moscow, is another characteristic tale of Russian 

214 



THE FACE OF RUSSIA 

methods. Did they banish them? Did they put 
them in detention camps? No. The police let it 
privately be known that if the Moscow Germans 
wished to leave Russia, there was a means. In Mos- 
cow, they said, it was impossible for a German to get 
a passport to return to his own country; but if he 
would go to the government of Perm, on the edge of 
Siberia at the base of the Ural Mountains, he could 
there apply for a passport and be allowed to leave. 
Hundreds of Germans took the hint and crowded the 
trains that went in the direction of Perm. They are 
still there. 

There are four distinct sets of Russian secret 
police, and their main job is to supervise the regular 
police and to spy upon each other, besides the dvor- 
niks, who act as concierges at your front door, and 
are all members of the government detective force. 
In times like the present, particularly, a mere sus- 
picion is enough to send you to a military court 
martial, unless you have influence, or to spirit you 
away to Siberia. 

After our arrest in Poland, when we reached 
Petrograd, we were dogged for weeks by municipal 
detectives, military secret agents, and members of 
the dreaded Fourth Arm — the sinister most secret 
police of all. But a Russian detective is easily rec- 
ognizable; whatever his disguise, whether as work- 
man, mujik, cab-driver, or loafer, he invariably wears 
patent-leather shoes and carries a silver-headed cane. 
A little group of them always stood in front of our 

215 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

hotel door, and during the long wearisome evenings 
we would often throw bottles at them out of the win- 
dow. Whenever we took a cab to go to the American 
embassy, a detective detached himself from the group 
and followed us in another cab. And when we swung 
into the Nevski we would stop and wait for him to 
round the corner, which he did at a fast trot, thinking 
us far ahead, and then we would follow him for hours, 
to his intense discomfiture. 

You cannot leave Russia without a "foreign 
vise" stamped on your passport by the city police, 
permitting you to cross the frontier. We were, of 
course, under surveillance of the city police; never- 
theless, by a present of thirty-five roubles, we got 
our foreign vise, and took the train for the Ru- 
manian border. At Vilna the next morning a major 
of the military police came into our compartment, 
and without asking who we were or where we were 
going, announced that we must return to Petrograd. 
There we found secret agents of the Fourth Arm wait- 
ing for us to conduct us to the chief's headquarters. 
But the chief did not know that we had obtained a 
foreign vise, or even that we had tried to flee; he 
simply wanted to read us a peremptory order from the 
Grand Duke expelling us from Russia by way of 
Vladivostok for an imaginary offense. 

In our hotel in Petrograd lived a squat, powerful 
woman who looked like an Eskimo, and had coarse 
hair bobbed like the roached mane of a Shetland 

pony. Her name was Princess . In the late 

216 



THE FACE OF RUSSIA 

afternoon she used to come into the tea-room, pick 
out a man that pleased her, and hold up her immense 
room-key in bald, frank invitation. This did not 
offend the Russians; but the hotel was full of Amer- 
ican business men and their wives, and they com- 
plained to the manager about the scandal. The 
manager ordered the princess to leave the hotel; 
she refused. So, Russian-like, one day when she was 
out he took her bed apart and removed it, with every 
other piece of furniture, from her room. She re- 
turned to the hotel, and for several hours stamped up 
and down the lobby calling him every name she could 
think of. Then she went out. Fifteen minutes later 
a secret-police official drove up in an automobile, 
descended upon the manager, and informed him that 
if he ever molested that woman again he would go 
to Siberia. The princess was an agent of the Fourth 
Arm. . . . 



217 



THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY 

FROM Zalezchik to Tarnopol we were alone in our 
compartment, but in the next one were four or 
five shaven-headed colonels and majors, their boots 
highly polished, their drab blouses ablaze with deco- 
rations. Windows were closed, belts unloosened, swords 
hung up. On a little wooden stand was a great brass 
samovar, steaming, and a wooden box of cigarettes 
overflowing on the table. They smoked and drank 
tea and talked about their souls. 

Moved by Russian curiosity and Russian hospi- 
tality, the major, speaking bad French, came into 
our compartment and introduced himself, and began 
telling all the military secrets he knew — where his 
regiment was, how many men it comprised, how it 
was planned to throw them across the Pruth the 
next night in the dark and surprise a cluster of Aus- 
trian batteries. This was not indiscretion on his part; 
simply, it was no fun to talk about these things to 
people who knew them already — and he was perfectly 
delighted to find strangers who seemed interested. 
He took us into his compartment, and the others made 
room, plied us with tea and cigarettes, eagerly ques- 
tioned us about ourselves, our business, how much sal- 
ary we got, did they drink much whiskey in America, 
was Newport as smart as the Riviera, and what we 
thought of the war. Then the original discussion was 

218 



THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY 

resumed, this time in broken French and German for 
our benefit. Each man had been telling about his 
first sexual experience; from that they entered upon 
a discussion of the psychology of sex, its relation to 
artistic energy, the power it had over the lives of 
men. . . . 

Only toward evening did we discover their busi- 
ness. They were a commission of officers sent by 
General Dimitriev to discover the whereabouts of sev- 
enteen million bags of flour, which were lost. 

Now seventeen million bags of flour, if assembled, 
would loom as large as the city of Poughkeepsie; yet 
it had vanished. It seemed that the Russian Govern- 
ment had bought, caused to be ground and packed the 
seventeen million bags as a provision for the South- 
western Armies for the year. The flour was shipped 
from Kiev to Tarnopol, a distance of two hundred and 
thirty versts, along a line of railroad crossed only 
twice by other lines; and yet within that one hundred 
and eighty odd miles more than thirty train-loads 
of flour had absolutely disappeared from the face of 
the earth. 

"But where can it have gone?" I asked. 

The grizzled colonel shrugged his shoulders with 
a smile. "We have reason to believe," said he, "that 
it was sold to the Rumanians and then shipped into 
Austria." He sighed. " Such things will happen. . . ." 

Graft in Russia is on such a naively vast scale 
that it becomes almost grotesque. 

219 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

During the Japanese War the French Govern- 
ment sent fifty batteries of .75 guns to the Russian 
army. They were registered as having passed the 
frontier, but strangely enough they never officially 
arrived in Russia. Six months later a French mili- 
tary officer in Brazil signalled to his government the 
presence of several Creusot .75 field-pieces. Since 
every gun that leaves the Creusot Works is registered, 
the company officials were puzzled, because no guns 
had even been sold to the Brazilian army. Upon 
comparing serial numbers, however, they turned out 
to be the ones shipped to Russia in 1905. 

I have another story from the Russian representa- 
tive of a foreign ship-building concern, who told me of 
a battleship which he personally designed for the 
Russian Government at that same time. The plans 
were accepted, the steel contracted for, an army of 
working men assembled at Odessa, and in the course 
of time it was reported that the battleship was ready 
for launching. The governor of the province personally 
broke a champagne-bottle over her bow, and a month 
later she put to sea on her trial trip. Then news came 
that the battleship had sunk somewhere in the Black 
Sea. Some one was suspicious — an investigation was 
ordered, and it developed that the battleship had never 
been built at all. 

In 1909, a French general visiting the Tsar was 
invited by his majesty to go down to Poland and in- 
spect a great new modern fort which had just been 
built near Warsaw. The military governor to whom 

220 



THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY 

he applied assured him that the country was in a 
very unsettled condition, and that it would be unwise 
to visit the fort without a proper military escort — and 
he could not spare soldiers for that. After com- 
bating all sorts of obstructions and evasions, the 
general lost his temper and insisted on going to see 
the fort alone. There was of course no fort. 

At the most serious epoch of the Russian retreat 
last summer, when whole divisions were annihilated 
because of the lack of ammunition for their cannon, 
I met an Englishman who had come to Russia three 
months before with a ship-load of shrapnel. He said 
it was still at Archangel — because he would not bribe 
the railway and ordnance officials to ship it to the 
front. . . . 

A French steel manufacturer of Moscow con- 
tracted to furnish several million shells for the Rus- 
sian artillery. Many car-loads were sent to the front, 
but when they arrived it was found that they did not 
fit the Russian cannon; so they were left behind on 
the retreat, and the Germans used them with entire 
success. Summoned before an investigating com- 
mission, the Frenchman produced his specifications, 
drawn up and signed by the Minister of War, Mr. 
Soukomlinov. 

Now Mr. Soukomlinov had been a comparatively 
poor man before the war; but after the commence- 
ment of hostilities he began to buy large blocks of 
Petrograd real estate, and it was freely said by people 
on the inside that he had been quite simply selling 

221 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

military secrets to the Germans. Later he resigned 
under a cloud of suspicion, which must have been 
grave indeed, as he was one of the leaders of the Re- 
actionaries. 

I was in Petrograd when a certain colonel drove 
up one day in front of the establishment of a friend 
of mine who sold automobile tires. The colonel had 
fifty motor ambulances, just then in great need at 
the front, and he asked my friend to look them over 
and estimate what it would cost to put new tires on 
the entire fifty. The salesman named the figure. 

"And how much do I get out of it?" asked the 
colonel. 

"The customary ten per cent." 

" All right, then, go ahead." 

The salesman came out and looked at the tires. 

"Why," he said, "you don't need new tires on 
these cars. They are almost new !" 

"You mind your own business!" snapped the 
colonel. "Put those tires on, and don't talk too much 
about it if you know what's good for you !" 

American business men selling supplies to the 
Russian Government had endless stories of the sub- 
lime voracity of the purchasing department. It did 
not make any difference how good the product — the 
question invariably asked was: "How much do I 
get?" In many cases, when the company could not 
afford to pay a large graft, the Russians themselves 
raised the prices to their own government. 

Suppose you had an automobile truck to sell. 

222 



THE NATIONAL INDUSTRY 

It was demonstrated before a commission which made 
a secret report to one of the officials of the Intendancy, 
who summoned you to consultation. Now, by a little 
gift of twenty or thirty dollars you had discovered 
that your product had been favorably reported on, 
or you had arranged that it would be favorably re- 
ported on by a similar gift to the other members of 
the commission. 

Upon entering the office of the Intendancy official, 
he would say: "Your automobile has been recom- 
mended very highly. But there are also other auto- 
mobiles. I must consider your proposition." He 
would look at his watch. "Excuse me for a moment, 
I must rim out. By the way, wouldn't you like a 
cigarette?" and, handing you his cigarette-case, he 
would leave you there. Perhaps you opened the 
cigarette-case and found it empty. And if you had 
been in Russia long you would extract from your 
pocket a five-hundred-rouble note, and slip it into 
the cigarette-box. When the officer returned he would 
say: "Now, about prices. What commission do I 
get?" You would arrange that to his satisfaction, 
and he would tell you to wait for his answer at your 
hotel. 

But, of course, it was all a gamble. Somebody else 
might have put a thousand-rouble note in the cigarette- 
box. . . . There were, of course, other ways of notify- 
ing prospective salesmen that they had to "come 
across." For example, a number of professional 
"intermediaries" hung around the hotels frequented 

223 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

by Americans, hinting that such an official ought to 
be "greased," and so forth. 

But the whole business was so frank and greedy 
that, even with the best intentions in the world, the 
secret police could not fail to stumble on some gigantic 
system of fraud every two or three days. Exposure 
after exposure revealed that the entire Intendancy 
was nothing but a mass of corruption; but the trail 
always led so far and so high that it had to be choked 
off. Princes and barons and financiers and army 
officers and cabinet ministers were implicated. Even 
the Grand Duke Serge, chief of the Department of 
Artillery Munitions, was suspected, and the Tsar's 
household was not free from calumny. Banks were 
seized and safe-deposit boxes broken open, and enough 
documents found to convict practically the whole 
bureaucracy. Persons high in power one day were 
replaced the next. Sometimes you went to the In- 
tendancy to see an official with whom you had talked 
three hours previously, and found a new man in his 
place. 

"Where is Colonel Verchovsky ? " you asked. 

Sometimes the newcomer replied briefly, "Sibe- 
ria"; sometimes he shrugged his shoulders; and some- 
times he lit a match, let it burn a little while, and 
then gracefully blew it out. 



224 



A PATRIOTIC REVOLUTION 

THE war-time traveller in Russia was immediately 
struck with Russian commercial dependence 
upon Germany. In Petrograd I tried to buy an anti- 
septic mouth-wash. "Ah," said the drug clerk, a Ger- 
man himself, by the way, "all such preparations come 
from Germany — we cannot get them now." And so 
with cameras, with films, with milk-chocolate, with 
clothing, automobiles, typewriters. There was even 
no good surgeon in Petrograd, no physician who was 
a specialist in diseases of the intestines; the reply 
was: "We always send such cases to Berlin." 

For the last ten years Russia has become more 
and more a German commercial colony. Every em- 
barrassment of Russia was taken advantage of by 
Germany to increase her trade advantages in the 
empire; as, for example, in 1905, German interests 
exacted enormous concessions by overt threats of 
aiding the revolutionists. The Germans also crept 
into government offices, even into the army adminis- 
tration. They dictated the plans of the Russian 
strategic railways on the German frontier. And in 
the Imperial Court, in the entourage of the Tsarina 
— herself a German — they exercised a sinister and 
powerful influence. 

Russian merchants, manufacturers, and bankers 
225 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

have long bitterly opposed the German power in 
their country, and this has made them enemies of 
the corrupt and tyrannical Russian Government — 
which is bound up with the Germans — and allies of 
the revolutionists. So in this war we have the curious 
spectacle of the Russian proletariat and the middle 
class both intensely patriotic, and both opposing the 
government of their country. And to understand 
Russia now one must realize the paradox that to 
make war on Germany is to make war on the Russian 
bureaucracy. 

When I was in Russia, in June, the internal struggle 
was at its height. A vast organization existed, even 
in the highest places of the government, to betray 
Russia to the enemy. A secret wireless station which 
intercepted military messages and transmitted them 
to Germany was discovered in a chimney of the 
Winter Palace itself. Besides the Soukomlinov scandal, 
there was also the case of General Masdeiev, who did 
a thriving export business in plans of Russian fortresses 
until somebody squealed. 

After the battle of Tannenburg General Rennen- 
kampf bitterly accused his own officers of selling him 
out; and in Russia they say that that was one of the 
reasons he was removed from command. The same 
thing is also said to be one of the reasons why the 
Grand Duke Nicholas was transferred to the Caucasus; 
at any rate, his bitter criticism of the Germans in the 
Imperial Court and the government were a matter of 
common knowledge. 

226 



A PATRIOTIC REVOLUTION 

Where does the Tsar stand in relation to all this? 
In Russia, the more you hear about him, the more 
fantastic and legendary he becomes. In Petrograd 
I knew an American fortune-teller who said he was 
a friend of the Emperor — and in proof of it produced 
a great platinum cigarette-case embossed with the 
Imperial monogram in diamonds, and with the gold 
relief of an outstretched hand; this, he said, the Tsar 
had given him in reward for his services in foretelling 
the fall of Warsaw. During the week before that 
event the Tsar had summoned him three times to 
Tsarskoe Selo, to read the Imperial palm and predict 
from its lines whether Warsaw would be taken by the 
Germans. The fortune-teller, who read the newspa- 
pers, said that it would. And it did. 

Men who have talked with the Tsar assured me 
that he knew little that was going on in the empire, 
except what his reactionary advisers chose to tell him. 

The fortune-teller had had many curious contacts 
with the Imperial Court. For instance, he said that 
several years ago he had been suddenly summoned 
from Vienna to Sebastopol, and taken out to the Im- 
perial yacht, lying off the harbor; there he found a 
concourse of surgeons, homeopaths, faith-healers, and 
all sorts of quacks from every part of Europe. They 
had been gathered to save the life of the young Tsar- 
ovitch, who had been stabbed in the hip by a revolu- 
tionist sailor. That, said the fortune-teller, was the 
basis for all those later stories of the Tsarovitch's 
mysterious illness. 

227 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

He had also run foul of Rasputin, the lay monk, 
that sinister figure whose power over the Tsarina, 
men say, is so evil and profound. The fortune-teller 
showed me an almost illegible scrawl of bad French 
which he had received the week previously, and which 
ran approximately as follows: 

"Father Gregory Rasputin asks me to inform 
you that he is cognizant of your visits to Tsarskoe 
Selo. He has no objection to your interviewing the 
Emperor; but if you are summoned by the Empress, 
and visit her, your stay in Russia is likely to be very 
unpleasant." 

Now, these things may not be true; but they are 
no more preposterous than other details of the life 
of that Oriental hierarchy — and no more impossible 
than the well-known fact that many members of the 
Duma came to have their palms read by this same 
fortune-teller on political questions. 

Under the surface of the vast, restless sea of Rus- 
sian life mighty currents rush obscurely to and fro. 
Crusades, revolutions, religious schisms, and tremen- 
dous popular movements go on; rarely they burst up 
into the light where they can be seen and judged, but 
one is always conscious of them. The great revolution 
of 1905 broke the surface, and at the outbreak of 
this war another revolution was ready to break, be- 
ginning with a gigantic general strike. Its sharp 
alarms were lost in the roar of mobilization and the 
barbaric pageantry of Imperial proclamations — prom- 

228 



A PATRIOTIC REVOLUTION 

ises by the Tsar of a more liberal government, of au- 
tonomy for Poland, of reform for the Jews. Probably 
the mobilization impressed the revolutionists more 
than the proclamations; for not only were the prom- 
ises made in the Imperial manifesto of 1905 not 
carried out, but in some respects things were worse 
than they ever had been. The Duma was in existence, 
but by changing the rules of procedure and using 
the police to terrorize provincial elections, the govern- 
ment had robbed it of all its hard-won prerogatives. 
The freedom of the press had been promised, but during 
the Beiliss trial that great paper, the Russkoe Slovo, 
was fined thousands of roubles for pubhshing reports 
of the proceedings. And that was a rich and powerful 
journal; other periodicals could not afford to publish 
anything at all. Free speech was promised, but you 
had to get a police permit for a public meeting — and 
in Russia the police are not very indulgent. Religious 
freedom was promised, and freedom of conscience; 
but recently the Minister of the Interior closed the 
Unified Catholic church in Petrograd, and others in 
other towns, on the ground that they violated the 
building code. The inviolability of the person was 
guaranteed and the right of trial, but never have so 
many people been kidnapped to Siberia, without even 
an accusation against them, as now. 

In the face of the wholesale corruption of the 
purchasing department of the government, the As- 
sociation of Zemstvos, or county councils, undertook 

to buy army supplies for the government — a job 

229 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

which it accomplished with real ability. This is an 
important fact, as the Association represented to a 
large extent the Russian middle class. 

All this time the Duma, limited as it was, had 
been getting more and more frankly critical. For 
example, one speaker said that Russia had a govern- 
ment which was extraordinarily inefficient, extraordi- 
narily corrupt, and extraordinarily traitorous. In addi- 
tion, it began to name specific grafters and traitors 
and hinted where the trail led, and it recommended 
that committees of the Duma be put in charge of the 
buying of supplies, in conjunction with the Zemstvos, 
and also the manufacture of munitions. Besides all 
this, there was rapidly growing popular unrest mani- 
fested all over the empire. And it was the discontent 
of patriots that determined Russia should win the war. 

On September 8 the Grand Duke Nicholas was 
superseded by the Tsar in command of the western 
front. The people looked upon this as a very doubt- 
ful move and wondered what lay back of it; for the 
Grand Duke was at least honest, and the Tsar had 
called to his pavilion at the front Mr. Soukomlinov, 
who was not trusted. An important Russian general 
stated that it meant that the Tsar was about to make 
a separate peace; at any rate, the ambassadors of the 
Entente Powers tried for three weeks to dissuade his 
Majesty from assuming command. 

One amazing rumor generally credited by intel- 
ligent people declared that the Tsar had been forced 

to take command by Rasputin, who had interpreted 

230 



A PATRIOTIC REVOLUTION 

visions of the Most High commanding that this be 
done. It is not improbable. 

On September 15 a strike was declared by the 
thirty thousand workmen in the Poteelov Armament 
Works in Petrograd, and the next day proclamations 
were posted on the street corners forbidding gatherings 
of workmen. Members of the foreign colonies, on 
account of the confidential information from the War 
Office, began hurriedly to leave Russia. On the fol- 
lowing morning it was reported that thirty workmen 
from the Poteelov Works, who had presented a petition 
to the Duma on the 15th, had been banished to Siberia 
with their families. Riots followed in which soldiers 
fired on the strikers, and on the same day the Tsar 
suddenly dissolved the Duma. In Petrograd it was 
known that all the members of the cabinet were op- 
posed to the dissolution except the Reactionary pre- 
mier, Goremykin. At the same time proclamations 
were posted calling new troops to the colors — which 
increased the general dissatisfaction — and on the 18th 
new posters appeared threatening that the strikers 
would be either sent to the trenches or given indefinite 
terms of imprisonment in Siberia, unless they returned 
to work on the following Tuesday, and unless there- 
after they obeyed orders. 

During these days spasmodic strikes on the rail- 
ways caused a shortage of food and fuel in Petrograd, 
and severe suffering followed among the population. 
A cholera epidemic broke out. The papers every day 
published long lists of deaths, calling them euphemis- 

231 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

tically "death from stomach trouble," and the official 
organs announced that during the winter there would 
be a shortage of everything except flour. 

On the 20th, news came of strikes in Kiev, Odessa, 
and other cities, and of the complete paralysis of the 
street-cars and electric-light plants in Moscow. The 
Association of Zemstvos and the Association of Cities 
sent a committee direct to the Tsar, threatening that 
unless he liberalized the government they would favor 
revolution, and declaring emphatically the absolute 
necessity of a liberal ministry responsible to the Duma. 
The Tsar refused to receive the delegation. 

Is there a powerful and destructive fire working 
in the bowels of Russia, or is it quenched? Rigid 
censorship and the suppression of news within the 
empire make it very difficult to know; but even after 
the prorogation of the Duma there were wholesale 
dismissals of Intendancy officials, and a complete 
military reorganization of the western armies, and 
even as I write this some powerful, quiet menace, as 
yet vaguely defined, has forced the Tsar to reopen 
the Duma with Imperial pomp. And Boris Stunner, 
the new premier, though a Reactionary of the worst 
type, has assured the Duma that "even in war time 
the work of internal reorganization must go on." 

In the White Russian town of Rovno I had a 
talk with a young volunteer non-commissioned officer, 
who had been clerk in a Petrograd bank before the 
war. The revolution of 1905, he explained, was not 

232 



A PATRIOTIC REVOLUTION 

a revolution at all; it was a gigantic scandal. It was 
the instinctive revolt of millions of human beings 
against robbery and tyranny that were absolutely 
absurd. "That is all over," he said hastily, for after 
all he belonged to the governing class. "But," he 
added, "after this war we shall ask for a new con- 
stitution." 

"And what if they don't give it to you?" said I. 
"Will there be a revolution?" 

"Oh, I think they will give it to us. But if not — 
well, we must have it !" 

"And how about the Jews?" 

"The Jews!" he cried. "What has democracy 
to do with the Jews? We do not want the Jews in 
Russia. Why don't they all go to America, or to the 
devil?" 



233 



THE BETRAYAL OF THE JEWS 

AT the beginning of the war French, English, and 
■L JL American newspapers published accounts of proc- 
lamations by the Tsar and the Grand Duke "to our 
faithful Jewish subjects." They were promised liberty 
of residence in all parts of Russia, removal of civic 
disabilities, freedom of worship, and, finally, the 
highest ranks of the army and the grades of nobility 
were opened to them. 

On the strength of this news, which seemed signif- 
icant of great, deep change, hundreds of Russian 
Jews returned from exile to enlist in the armies of the 
Tzar, and the Jewish women offered their services to 
the Russian Red Cross. Their reward was this: The 
men, disillusioned and bitter, died in the trenches 
defending their oppressors — and the women nurses 
were outraged in the hospitals by the soldiers they 
tended. For the truth was that no such proclama- 
tions had been issued in Russia. It was all a He in- 
vented in London and Paris by Russian Government 
agents, to hoodwink the Liberal peoples of the world. 

I dined with a captain of Atamanski Cossacks 
at headquarters in a Bessarabian village near the 
front. He was telling of his regiment: 

"They are such impetuous fellows, the officers 
cannot always hold them; when they come into a 

234 



THE BETRAYAL OF THE JEWS 

village where there are Jews, for example. Ah, the 
rascals ! When they get to killing Jews they cannot 
be halted!" 

"Speaking of Jews," remarked an infantry cap- 
tain across the table, "a very funny thing happened 
when my company was stationed at Brest-Litovsk. 
A young Jewish soldier one day was seen to kiss the 
hand of an old rabbi. My men were furious; they 
kicked and cuffed him well, and then buried his face 
in a pile of ordure." 

Robinson protested. But the colonel at the head 
of the table held up his hand gravely. 

"You Americans," he said, "do not understand 
what we have to endure from these people. The 
Jews are all traitors to Russia." 

I remarked that that was curious, because in 
Austria and Germany they were entirely loyal, and 
in fact had subscribed the greater part of the last two 
Austrian war loans. 

"That is different," replied the colonel firmly. 
"In Germany and Austria the Jews have civil rights; 
therefore naturally they are patriotic. In Russia, 
however, the Jews have no civil rights. So they be- 
tray us. So we kill them." 

He seemed perfectly satisfied with this explana- 
tion, and the others did, too. . . . 

For two hundred miles we travelled behind the 
Russian front through Bucovina and Galicia into 
Poland, and everywhere were evidences of the horrors 
inflicted on the Jews. Village after village of white- 

235 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

washed, brightly painted little mud houses was sacked 
and smashed — especially the houses where Jews had 
lived — by the Cossacks or the Russian soldiers. Zal- 
ezchik, where thousands of Jews had lived, was a 
mass of ruins, and the population had been driven out 
toward the enemy in front of the Russian advance. 
In Rovno there had been anti-Semitic riots, and in 
Kielze, Poland, a real old-fashioned pogrom — whole- 
sale slaughter by the Cossacks. I have told in another 
place the stories of the Jew apothecary of Zalezchik 
and the Jew hotel-keeper in Cholm, and what a small 
town in the Pale of Settlement looks like. In Vilna 
twenty thousand Jews, men, women, and children, 
were torn from their homes and sent to Siberia, on the 
wholesale charge that they were plotting treachery. 
And it was in Vilna that two English war correspon- 
dents were arrested as spies and taken to the police 
court. They had a small black despatch-bag, which 
the police commanded them to open. They refused to 
do so. Then the police brought in a Jew with his 
hands bound and his back bare, and proceeded to beat 
him with whips. 

"Do you see what we are doing with this Jew?" 
said the chief of police. "Well, then, you had better 
open that bag. . . ." 

Everywhere the same old terror for the Jews, 
the same hate and fear of priests and Cross and the 
name of Jesus Christ. 

On the train to Lemberg we got into a compart- 
ment with two minor officials of the postal service, 

236 



THE BETRAYAL OF THE JEWS 

who were typical of the great mass of Russian bureau- 
crats. 

"Civil rights for the Jews !" cried one in astonish- 
ment. "You are mad! The Russian people would 
not allow it. As for the official ranks of the army 
being open to Jews, that is ridiculous. Their own 
men would shoot them as soon as they gave an order. 
I know only two Jewish officers in the Russian army, 
and they are detailed for clerical work in the War 
Department. Their fathers, you see, are rich. But 
they would not dare to go on active service." 



237 



PETROGRAD AND MOSCOW 

MOST travellers speak of Moscow as the Heart of 
Russia, the real Russian city, and dismiss Petro- 
grad as an imitation of other European capitals. But 
to me Petrograd seems more characteristically Russian 
— with its immense facades of government buildings 
and barracks marching along as far as the eye can reach, 
broad streets, and mighty open spaces. The great 
stone quays along the Neva, the palaces, cathedrals, 
and Imperial avenues paved with cobbles grew under 
the hands of innumerable serfs chained in a swamp 
by the will of a tyrant, and were cemented with their 
blood; for where Petrograd now sprawls for miles 
and miles, a city built for giants, was nothing but a 
feverish marsh a hundred and fifty years ago. And 
there, where no roads naturally lead, the most desolate 
spot, the most vulnerable and the most remote from 
any natural centre of the Russian Empire, Peter the 
Great had a whim to found his capital. Twenty 
thousand workmen a year for ten years were killed by 
fever, cold, and disease in the building of Petrograd. 
Nine times the court nobles themselves conspired to 
wreck the hated city and force the court to return to 
Moscow; three times they set fire to it, and three 
times the Tsar hung them at the doors of the palaces 
he had forced them to build. A powerful section of 

238 



PETROGRAD AND MOSCOW 

the Reactionary party has always agitated for the 
restoration of Moscow as capital, and it is only in the 
last twenty years that the population of Petrograd has 
not been artificially kept up. 

Great canals of deep, sombre water curve through 
the city everywhere, and along these move vast wooden 
barges hundreds of feet long, piled high with birch- 
wood for burning — cut in the gloom of ancient forests 
with ringing axes, and floated down flat, deserted 
rivers to the sound of slow minor boat songs under 
the northern lights. And into the dark water every 
night obscure and restless, miserable poor throw 
themselves — multitudes of them. Their bodies go 
out with the tide, under the frowning interminable 
barracks, slipping through the caves beneath the 
streets, and float to sea on the broad Neva along 
that splendid front of palaces yellow and barbarically 
red, those fantastic cupolas and pinnacles and gigantic 
monuments. 

In the immense silent squares and wide streets 
the people are lost; in spite of its two millions or more 
of human beings Petrograd seems perpetually empty. 
Only on summer evenings, in the enormous amuse- 
ment parks, among the open-air theatres, scenic 
railways, merry-go-rounds, and cafes, hundreds of thou- 
sands of people, in great masses and currents of shout- 
ing, laughing, singing humanity, move aimlessly to 
and fro, with a feeling of uncontrollable force like 
the sea. Or in time of revolution, or during some 
important religious festival, when the people choke 

2 39 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

miles of great streets from wall to wall, and the thunder 
of their untimed feet, the roar of their unorganized 
singing, the power of their spontaneous will dwarfs 
even that Imperial City. 

On the day of the fiesta of Our Lady of Kazan 
I was caught at the corner of the Nevski Prospekt and 
the Morskaia by sudden inundations of great mobs 
pouring toward the cathedral from every street, hats 
off, faces exultingly raised, deep voices lifting simple 
slow hymns. Over their heads swam the jewelled and 
glittering ikons, upheld by bareheaded, bearded, 
giant priests in rich vestments all covered with gold. 
Small choir-boys swung censers. Flanking the holy 
procession, peasant women walked sideways, hand in 
hand, with blank exalted faces, guarding the ikons. 
Men and women crowded in single file to pass under 
the sacred images, screaming, kicking, and pulling 
each other; and every few minutes the priests lowered 
them while a hundred kneeling people flung themselves 
forward to kiss the pictures with their lips. And all 
the time the processions moved slowly on in that 
terrible sea of people, meeting, crossing, wavering 
over the heads of the crowd, flashing back the sun 
that burst out between clouds. And for hours a solid 
mile and a half of people blocked the Nevski Prospekt 
and all the streets adjoining before the Cathedral of 
Our Lady of Kazan, praying and crossing themselves 
with a fluttering motion, and singing. 

With Russians religion is extraordinarily alive. 
On the streets people cross themselves incessantly, 

240 



PETROGRAD AND MOSCOW 

especially when passing the churches, and the cab- 
drivers lift their hats and touch forehead, breast, 
and shoulders whenever they see an ikon. Little 
chapels are open all day long, even in the fashionable 
shopping quarters, and there are continual services 
for the constantly flowing crowds that stop to kneel 
and kiss the holy images as they pass. In certain 
very holy churches and shrines there is always, day 
and night, a jam of people, kneeling, bowing, mutter- 
ing before the ikonostas. But, as far as I could discover, 
religion in Russia does not seem to be a temporal 
power, or a matter of politics, or a moral or ethical 
rule of life. The priests have often mean, vicious 
faces, and monks in the great monasteries lead the 
extravagantly dissolute lives of rich and unrestrained 
ecclesiastics everywhere; and the church, like all 
powerful churches, lives fatly and builds its golden 
altar-screens from the contributions of the poor, by 
playing on their darkest superstitions. To the simple 
Russian peasant, however, his religion is a source of 
spiritual force, both a divine blessing on his under- 
takings and a mystical communion with God. The 
thief and the murderer go to kiss the ikons before 
robbing a house or killing a man. The revolutionists 
carry the ikons at the head of their ranks, and the 
mobs that shoot them down also have ikons. In 
every Russian house an ikon hangs in the corner of 
the room, and in every hotel and railway-station. 

Great religious fervors shake the Russian people, 
as they did the Jews and the Arabs, splitting them 

241 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

into innumerable mystical sects. Miracles occur 
frequently; holy men and self- torturing saints wander 
about the country, healing and preaching strange 
gospels. Even in Petrograd, the least religious of 
Russian cities, priests and monks were everywhere, 
and one of them, Gregory Rasputin, was rumored to 
be almost the real ruler of the empire. 

At night — for it was June — the sun sank slower 
and slower. At nine o'clock it was as light as late 
summer evenings at home; at half past ten the sun 
touched the horizon, and moved slowly around from 
west to east until hah past two in the morning, when 
it rose again. If you happened to wake up at mid- 
night it was impossible to tell whether it was night 
or day — especially since the Russians seemed to have 
no regular hours for going to bed. Outside our win- 
dow in St. Isaac's Square people would be sitting on 
the benches reading their newspapers; before the 
house doors squatted the dvomiks huddled in their 
shubas, gossiping; cabs drove past, and people went 
along the sidewalk, and there were even shops open. 

Sometimes we drove. "Istvosschik!" I cried, 
standing in the middle of the street; and immediately 
there materialized from nowhere twenty or thirty 
little cabs driven by hairy individuals crowned with 
glazed, bell-shaped hats with curling brims, and 
padded under their coats so as to appear monstrously 
fat. Driving round and round us, they screamed 
hideously their competitive prices. There was a 
municipal tariff for cabs, and a copy of it was posted 

242 



PETROGRAD AND MOSCOW 

on the back of the driver's seat; but you had to pay 
at least double the prices on it. And the police always 
took the cabman's part. 

We roamed around the city in the interminable 
twilight. In front of the barracks dense little crowds 
surrounded some soldier leaping and kicking on his 
hams a peasant dance, perhaps from Siberia, to the 
breathless braying of an accordion. In St. Isaac's 
Square the new recruits by companies were stamping 
through their drill, with resounding great boots, and 
roaring the traditional regimental answers to the 
greeting of a general. 

"Good morning, my children !" cried a high, flat 
voice. 

"Good morning to your Generalship!" bellowed 
a hundred big men in unison. 

"I congratulate you, my children!" 

"Happy to have had the opportunity, your 
Generalship!" 

Three or four times a day the bell-ringers in the 
ponderous cupolas of St. Isaac's Cathedral looped the 
bell-ropes about their elbows, knees, feet, and hands, 
and all the great and little bells began to boom and 
jangle — thirty-five of them — in a wild, dissonant rag- 
time: 

Teeng! Tong! Teeng-ting-a-tang-tong ! Boom! Bom- 
tick-a-ting-tingle-ingle-boom ! Tang-tong-tick-a-tangle-tongle- 
boom-tang-tingle-tick-tick-a-bom! 

By hundreds, by thousands the new recruits, 
still in their peasant clothes, with big numbers chalked 

243 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

on their backs, passed by. There seemed no end to 
them. Day after day and week after week they 
poured into Petrograd, and had been pouring in for 
more than a year, to be roughly whipped into shape, 
loaded on endless trains, and hurled carelessly west- 
ward or south to choke with the slaughter of sheer 
numbers the terrible German machine. . . . And 
yet everywhere on the streets, and all over Russia, I 
saw multitudes of fresh men who had not yet been 
called to the colors. 

Moscow, known affectionately to all Russians as 
Matuschka Moskva, "Little Mother Moscow," is still 
the Holy City, the intellectual capital, and the last 
stronghold of the old splendid barbaric Russia. Mos- 
cow's streets are narrow, and her cities crowd wall 
within wall around the sacred citadel which epitomizes 
all the history of the empire. But the pulse of Russia 
and the red renewing blood and the flow of change 
have left Moscow. Her ancient and opulent commerce, 
however, that made Muscovite merchant princes a 
legend in Europe in the Middle Ages, is still growing. 
The number of buildings of modern German architec- 
ture strikes one immediately. 

That wideness and vastness and lavish disre- 
gard of human life so characteristic of Petrograd, of 
the war, and of Russia as it seemed to me, again ap- 
pears in the Kremlin, where for a thousand years the 
hopes and the longings and the faith of the Russian 

people were centred. The Red Square is as gigantic 

244 



PETROGRAD AND MOSCOW 

as any square in the new capital, and immeasurably 
ancient. Cyclopean red walls, crenellated and topped 
with fantastic towers, pierced with gates in whose 
gloom hang great staring ikons, stride down-hill, and 
along the bank of the river, proudly encircling the 
most insolently rich capitol in the world. Inside, 
upon one square, within a hundred yards of each 
other, stand four cathedrals, each with an altar- 
screen of solid gold and jewels, glittering up from the 
long ranks of the tombs of Tsars, into the cloud of 
blue incense that forever palls a ceiling inlaid with 
monstrous mosaics. Ivan Veliki leans upward, honey- 
combed with great bells. Miles of palaces twist and 
turn, whose rooms are furnished in solid slabs of gold 
and pillars of semiprecious stones — Imperial throne- 
room after throne-room, to the gaudy, half-savage 
apartments where Ivan the Terrible lived, and the 
treasury that holds the Peacock Throne of Persia, and 
the Golden Throne of the Tartars, and the Diamond 
Throne of the Tsars. Monasteries, barracks, ancient 
arsenals along whose facades are piled the thousands of 
cannon that Napoleon left on the road from Moscow; 
the huge bell of Boris Godounov cracked and lying on 
the ground; the Tsar cannon, too big for any charge — 
and out through the Spasskya Gate, with the soldiers 
on guard to see that you remove your hat when you 
pass under the Ikon of the Redeemer. . . . 

On Sunday we took the steamer up the river to 
the Sparrow Hills, where Napoleon stood to watch 
Moscow burning. Along the river for miles people 

245 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

were bathing from the bank, groups of men and 
women, and all over the hills swarmed an immense 
multitude making holiday. They sprawled on the 
grass, ran races, moved in big singing droves under the 
trees; and in little hollows and flat places accordions 
jiggled, while the wild stamping dances went on. 
There were drunken people haranguing huge audiences, 
and senseless men asleep, clutching bottles in their 
hands, and cripples and idiots followed by laughing 
throngs, like a mediaeval fair. An old woman in rags 
came hobbling down the hill, her hair streaming about 
her face, lifted arms with clinched fists over her head, 
shouting hysterically. A man and a girl pounded 
each other with their fists, weeping. On a high point 
of land stood a soberly dressed man with his hands 
clasped behind his back, evidently making a speech to 
the restless flowing crowds beneath him. There was 
in the air a feeling of recklessness and gloom, as if 
anything might happen. . . . 

We sat a long time in the cafe at the top of the 
hill, looking out over the plain where the river made 
a great curve, while the sun sank westward over the 
innumerable bulbs and cupolas of golden, green, 
blue, pink, and clashing colors of the four hundred 
churches of Moscow. And as we sat there, far, faintly, 
and wild came the galloping clangor of countless 
bells, beating out the rhythm that has in it all the 
deep solemnity and mad gayety of Russia. 



246 



IV 
CONSTANTINOPLE 



TOWARD THE CITY OF EMPERORS 

THE handsome great sleeping-cars bore brass in- 
scriptions in svelte Turkish letters and in French, 
"Orient Express" — that most famous train in the 
world, which used to run from Paris direct to the 
Golden Horn in the prehistoric days before the war. 
A sign in Bulgarian said "Tsarigrad" — literally "City 
of Emperors" — also the Russian name for the eastern 
capital that all Slavs consider theirs by right. And 
a German placard proclaimed pompously, "Berlin- 
Constantinopel" — an arrogant prophecy in those days, 
when the Constantinople train went no farther west 
than Sofia, and the drive on Serbia had not begun. 

We were an international company: Three Eng- 
lish officers in mufti bound for Dedeagatch; a French 
engineer on business to Philippopolis; a Bulgar mili- 
tary commission going to discuss the terms of the 
treaty with Turkey; a Russian school-teacher re- 
turning to his home in Burgas; an American tobacco 
man on a buying tour around the Turkish Black Sea 
ports; a black eunuch in fez, his frock coat flaring 
over wide hips and knock knees; a Viennese music- 
hall dancer and her man headed for the cafe concerts 
of Pera; two Hungarian Red Crescent delegates, and 
assorted Germans to the number of about a hundred. 
There was a special car full of bullet-headed Krupp 
workmen for the Turkish munition factories, and two 

249 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

compartments reserved for an Unterseeboot crew going 
down to relieve the men of U-54 — boys seventeen or 
eighteen years old. And in the next compartment 
to mine a party of seven upper-class Prussians played 
incessant "bridge": government officials, business 
men, and intellectuals on their way to Constantinople 
to take posts in the embassy, the Regie, the Ottoman 
Debt, and the Turkish universities. Each was a 
highly efficient cog, trained to fit exactly his place 
in the marvellous German machine that ground al- 
ready for the Teutonic Empire of the East. 

The biting irony of life in neutral countries went 
with us. It was curious to watch the ancient habit 
of cosmopolitan existence take possession of that 
train-load. Some ticket agent with a sense of humor 
had paired two Englishmen with a couple of German 
embassy attaches in the same compartment — they 
were scrupulously polite to each other. The French- 
man and the other Britisher gravitated naturally to 
the side of the fair Austrian, where they all laughed 
and chattered about youthful student days in Vienna. 
Late at night I caught one of the German diplomats 
out in the corridor gossiping about Moscow with 
the Russian teacher. All these men were active on 
the firing-line, so to speak, except the Russian — and 
he, of course, was a Slav, and without prejudices. . . . 

But in the morning the English, the Frenchman, 
and the Russian were gone — the breathing-place be- 
tween borders of hate was past — and we fled through 
the grim marches of the Turkish Empire. 

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TOWARD THE CITY OF EMPERORS 

The shallow, sluggish, yellow Maritza River, 
bordered by gigantic willows, twisted through an 
arid valley. Dry, brown hills rolled up, on whose 
slopes no green thing grew; flat plains baked under 
scanty scorched grass; straggly corn-fields lay droop- 
ing, with roofed platforms on stilts starting up here 
and there, where black-veiled women squatted with 
guns across their knees to scare away the crows. 
Rarely a village — miserable huts of daubed mud, 
thatched with dirty straw, clustering around the 
flat dome of a little mosque and its shabby minaret. 
Westward, a mile away, the ruins of a red-tiled town 
climbed the hillside, silent and deserted since the 
Bulgarians bombarded it in 191 2, and shot off the 
tips of the two minarets. The crumbling stumps of 
minarets stood alone on the desolate flats, marking 
the spot of some once-living village or town whose 
very traces had disappeared — so quickly do the ephem- 
eral buildings of the Turks return to the dust; but 
the minarets stand, for it is forbidden to demolish a 
mosque that has once been consecrated. 

Sometimes we stopped at a little station; a group 
of huts, a minaret, adobe barracks, and rows of mud- 
bricks baking in the sun. A dozen gayly painted 
little arabas slung high on their springs waited for 
passengers; six or seven veiled women would crowd 
into one, pull the curtains to shield them from the 
public gaze, and rattle giggling away in a cloud of 
golden dust. Bare-legged peasant hanums, robed all 
in dull green, shuffled single file along the road, carrying 

251 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

naked babies, with a coquettish lifting of veils for the 
windows of the train. By the platform were piled 
shimmering heaps of melons brought from the in- 
terior — the luscious green sugar-melon, and the yellow 
kavoon, jwhich smells like flowers and tastes like noth- 
ing else in the world. An ancient tree beside the sta- 
tion spread an emerald shade over a tiny cafe, where 
the turbaned, slippered old Turks of the country sat 
gravely at their coffee and narghilehs. 

Along the railway, aged bent peasants, unfit for 
the firing-line, stood guard — bare-footed, ragged, armed 
with rusty hammer-lock muskets and belted with 
soft-nosed bullets of an earlier vintage still. They 
made a pathetic effort to straighten up in military 
attitudes as we passed. . . . But it was at Adrianople 
that we saw the first regular Turkish soldiers, in their 
unfitting khaki uniforms, puttees, and those German- 
designed soft helmets that look like Arab turbans, 
and come down flat on the forehead, so that a Moham- 
medan can salaam in prayers without uncovering. A 
mild-faced, serious, slow-moving people they seemed. 

The brisk young Prussian who got on at Adrianople 
was strikingly different. He wore the uniform of a 
Bey in the Turkish army, with the tall cap of brown 
astrakhan ornamented with the gold crescent, and 
on his breast were the ribbons of the Iron Cross, and 
the Turkish Order of the Hamidieh. His scarred face 
was set in a violent scowl, and he strode up and down 
the corridor, muttering " Gottverdammte Dummheitl" 
from time to time. At the first stop he descended, 

252 



TOWARD THE CITY OF EMPERORS 

looked sharply around, and barked something in Turk- 
ish to the two tattered old railway guards who were 
scuffling along the platform. 

"Tchaboukl Hurry!" he snapped. "Sons of 
pigs, hurry when I call!" 

Startled, they came running at a stiff trot. He 
looked them up and down with a sneer; then shot a 
string of vicious words at them. The two old men 
trotted off and, wheeling, marched stiffly back, try- 
ing to achieve the goose-step and salute in Prus- 
sian fashion. Again he bawled insultingly in their 
faces; again, with crestfallen expression, they repeated 
the manoeuvre. It was ludicrous and pitiable to 
watch. . . . 

"Gott in Himmel!" cried the instructor to the 
world in general, shaking his fists in the air, "were 
there ever such animals ? Again ! Again ! Tchdbouk ! 
Run, damn you ! " 

Meanwhile, the other soldiers and the peasants 
had withdrawn from range, and stood in clusters at 
a distance, mildly inspecting this amazing human 
phenomenon. ... Of a sudden a little Turkish 
corporal detached himself from the throng, marched 
up to the Prussian, saluted, and spoke. The other 
glared, flushed to his hair, the cords stood out on his 
neck, and he thrust his nose against the little man's 
nose, and screamed at him. 

"Bey effendi — " began the corporal. And "Bey 
effendi — " he tried again to explain. But the Bey 
went brighter scarlet, grew more offensive, and finally 

253 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

drew back in good old Prussian fashion and slapped 
him in the face. The Turk winced and then stood 
quite still, while the red print of a hand sprang out 
on his cheek, staring without expression straight into 
the other's eyes. Undefinable, scarcely heard, a faint 
wind of sound swept over all those watching peo- 
ple. . . . 

All afternoon we crawled southeast through a 
blasted land. The low, hot air was heavy, as if with 
the breath of unnumbered generations of dead; a 
sluggish haze softened the distance. Thin corn-fields, 
irregular melon patches, dusty willows around a coun- 
try well were all the vegetation. Occasionally there 
was a rustic thrashing-floor, where slow oxen drew 
round and round over the yellow corn a heavy sledge 
full of laughing, shouting youngsters. Once a caravan 
of shambling dromedaries, roped together, crossed our 
vision, rocking along with great dusty bales slung 
from their humps — the three small boys who were 
drivers skylarking about them. No living thing for 
miles and miles, nor any human evidences except the 
ruins of old cities, abandoned as the ebbing popula- 
tion withdrew into the city or Asia Minor beyond. 
. . . Yet this land has always been empty and desolate 
as it is to-day; even at the height of the Byzantine 
Empire, it was good policy to keep a barren waste be- 
tween the City and the countries of the restless bar- 
barians. . . . 

Now we began to pass troop-trains. English 
254 



TOWARD THE CITY OF EMPERORS 

submarines in the Sea of Marmora had paralyzed 
water transport to Gallipoli, and the soldiers went 
by railroad to Kouleli Bourgas, and then marched 
overland to Bulair. The freight-car doors were crowded 
with dark, simple faces; there came to us incessant 
quavering nasal singing to the syncopated accom- 
paniment of shrill pipes and drums. One was full 
of savage-eyed Arabs from the desert east of Aleppo, 
dressed still in sweeping gray and brown burnooses, 
their thin, intense faces more startling for the en- 
circling folds. 

Tchataldja was feverishly active; narrow-gauge 
little trains loaded with guns, steel trench roofs, piles 
of tools, puffed off along the folds of the hills, and the 
naked brown slopes swarmed with a multitude of 
tiny figures working on trenches against the eventu- 
ality of Bulgarian invasion. . . . 

The sun set behind, warming for an instant with 
a wash of gold the desolate leagues on leagues of 
waste. Night came suddenly, a moonless night of 
overwhelming stars. We moved slower and slower, 
waiting interminably on switches while the whining, 
singing troop-trains flashed by. . . . Toward mid- 
night I fell asleep, and woke hours later to find one 
of the Germans shaking me. 

"Constantinople," said he. 

I could make out the dim shape of a gigantic 
wall rushing up as we roared through a jagged breach 
in it. On the right crumbling half-battlements — the 
Byzantine sea-wall — fell suddenly away, and showed 

255 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the sea lapping with tiny waves at the railway em- 
bankment; the other side was a rank of tall, unpainted 
wooden houses leaning crazily against each other, 
over mouths of gloom which were narrow streets, and 
piling back up the rising hill of the city in chaotic 
masses of jumbled roofs. Over these suddenly sprang 
out against the stars the mighty dome of an imperial 
mosque, minarets that soared immeasurably into the 
sky like great lances, broken masses of trees on Seraglio 
Point, with a glimpse of the steep black wall that had 
buttressed the Acropolis of the Greeks upon its moun- 
tain, the vague forms of kiosks, spiked chimneys of 
the imperial kitchens in a row, and the wide, flat roof 
of the Old Seraglio palace — Istamboul, the prize of 
the world. 



256 



CONSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE GERMANS 

AT four hours precisely, Turkish time (or three 
JLjL minutes past nine a la fraqnue), on the morning 
of chiharshenbi, yigirmi utch of the month of Temoos, 
year of the Hegira bin utch yuze otouz utch, I woke to 
an immense lazy roar, woven of incredibly varied 
noises — the indistinct shuffling of a million slippers, 
shouts, bellows, high, raucous peddler voices, the 
nasal wail of a muezzin strangely calling to prayer 
at this unusual hour, dogs howling, a donkey braying, 
and, I suppose, a thousand schools in mosque court- 
yards droning the Koran. From my balcony I looked 
down on the roofs of tall Greek apartments which 
clung timorously to the steep skirts of Pera and 
broke into a dark foam of myriad Turkish houses 
that rushed across the valley of Kassim Pasha, swirling 
around the clean white mosque and two minarets, 
and the wave of close trees they sprang from. The 
little houses were all wood — rarely with a roof of old 
red tiles — unpainted, weathered to a dull violet, 
clustered where the builder's caprice had set them, 
threaded with a maze of wriggling streets, and spotted 
with little windows that caught the sun — golden. 
Beyond the valley they crowded up the hillside, jum- 
bled at every conceivable angle, like a pile of children's 
blocks — and all of the windows ablaze. Piale Pasha 
Mosque started up northward, dazzling, its minaret 

257 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

leaping from the very dome — built to look like the 
mast of a ship by the great Kaptan Pasha, who broke 
the sea power of Venice in the sixteenth century. 
Down this valley Mohammed the Conqueror dragged 
his ships after hauling them over the high ridge where 
Pera stands, and launched them in the Golden Horn. 
Shabby Greek San Dimitri to the right; a dark pageant 
of cypresses along the crest over Kassim Pasha, that 
bounds the barren field of the Ok-Meidan, whose 
white stones mark the record shots of great Sultans 
who were masters of the bow and arrow; the heights 
of Haskeui, sombre with spacious wooden houses 
weathered black, where the great Armenian money 
princes lived in the dangerous days, and where now. 
the Jews spawn in indescribable filth; northward 
again, over the mighty shoulder of a bald hill, the 
treeless, thick-clustered field of the Hebrew cemetery, 
as terrible as a razed city. 

Bounding all to the west, the Golden Horn curved, 
narrowing east, around to north, a sheet of molten 
brass on which were etched black the Sultan's yacht 
and the yacht of the Khedive of Egypt — with the 
blue sphinxes painted on her stern — and the steamer 
General, sleeping quarters of German officers; dis- 
mantled second-rate cruisers, the pride of the Turkish 
navy, long gathering barnacles in the Golden Horn; 
the little cruiser Hamedieh, swarming with tiny dots, 
which were German sailors in fezzes; and countless 
swarms of darting caiks, like water-beetles. 

Up from that bath of gold swept Stamboul from 
258 



CONSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE GERMANS 

her clustering tangle of shanties on piles, rising in a 
pattern of huddling little roofs too intricate for any 
eye to follow, to the jagged crest lifting like music 
along her seven hills, where the great domes of the 
imperial mosques soared against the sky and flung 
aloft their spear-like minarets. 

I could see the Stamboul end of the Inner Bridge 
and a little corner of the Port of Commerce, with the 
tangled jam of ships which were caught there when 
the war broke out. Above the bridge lay Phanar, 
where the Patriarch, who still signs himself "Bishop 
of New Rome," has his palace, for centuries the power- 
ful fountain of life and death for all the millions of 
" Roum-mildi" ; Phanar, refuge of imperial Byzantine 
families after the fall of the city, home of those mer- 
chant princes who astounded Renaissance Europe 
with their wealth and bad taste; Phanar, for five 
hundred years centre of the Greek race under the Turk. 
Farther along Balata — the Palatium of the Romans — 
and Aivan Serai above it, shadowed in the immense 
sprawling ruins of Byzantine palaces, where the walls 
of Manuel Commenus stagger up from the water 
and are lost in the city. Beyond, Eyoub, the sacred 
village of tombs around that dazzling mosque which 
no Christian may enter, and the interminable mass of 
cypresses of that holiest of all cemeteries, climbing 
the steep hill behind. Greek and Roman walls; the 
spikes of four hundred minarets; mosques that were 
built with a king's treasure in a burst of vanity by 
the old magnificent Sultans, others that were Christian 

259 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

churches under the Empress Irene, whose walls are 
porphyry and alabaster, and whose mosaics, white- 
washed over, blaze through in gold and purple splen- 
dor; fragments of arches and columns of semiprecious 
stones, where once the golden statues of emperors 
stood — and marching splendidly across the sky-line 
of the city the double-arches of the tree-crowned 
aqueduct. 

The hotel porter was a clever Italian with a nose 
for tips. He bent over me deferentially as I break- 
fasted, rubbing his hands. 

"Excellency," he said in French, "the secret 
police have been here to inquire about your Excellency. 
Would your Excellency like me to tell them any partic- 
ular thing . . . ? " 

Daoud Bey was waiting for me, and together we 
went out into Tramway Street, where the electric cars 
clang past, newsboys shout the late editions of the 
newspapers written in French — and apartment-houses, 
curiosity-shops, caf£s, banks, and embassies look like 
a shabby quarter in an Italian city. Here every one, 
men and women, wore European clothes, just a tri- 
fle off in fashion, fit, and cloth — like "store clothes" 
bought on Third Avenue. It was a crowd of no nations 
and of all bloods, clever, facile, unscrupulous, shallow 
— Levantine. At the gates of the few open embassies 
sat the conventional Montenegrin doorkeepers, in sav- 
age panoply of wide trousers and little jackets, and 
enormous sashes stuck full of pistols; kavases of con- 

260 



CONSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE GERMANS 

sulates and legations slouched around the doors of 
diplomats, in uniforms covered with gold lace, fezzes 
with arms blazing on them, and swords. An occasional 
smart carriage went by, with driver and footmen 
wearing the barbaric livery of the diplomatic service. 
Yet turn into any street off the Grand Rue or the Rue 
des Tramways, and the tall overhanging buildings 
echoed with appeals of half-naked ladies leaning 
callously from windows all the way up to the fourth 
floor. In those narrow, twisting alleys the fakers and 
the thieves and the vicious and unfit of the Christian 
Orient crowded and shouted and passed; filth was 
underfoot, pots of ambiguous liquids rained carelessly 
down, and the smells were varied and interesting. 
Miles and miles of such streets, whole quarters given 
over to a kind of weak debauch; and fronting the 
cultivated gentlemen and delicate ladies of the Euro- 
pean colony only the bold front of the shell of hotels 
and clubs and embassies. 

It was the day after Warsaw fell into German 
hands. Yesterday the German places had hoisted 
the German and Turkish flags to celebrate the event. 
As we walked down the steep street, that with the 
mercilessness of modern civilization cuts an ancient 
Turkish cemetery in half so the street-cars may pass, 
Daoud Bey related interesting details of what followed. 

"The Turkish police went around," said he with 
some gusto, "and ordered the German flags pulled 
down. We had the devil of a row, for the German 
embassy made a strong complaint." 

261 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"Why did you do that? Aren't you allies?" 

He looked at me sideways and smiled mockingly. 
"No one is more fond than I of our Teutonic brothers 
(for you know the Germans let our people think they 
are Mohammedans). According to the German idea, 
perhaps the taking of Warsaw was also a Turkish 
victory. But we are getting touchy about the spread 
of German flags in the city." 

I noticed that many shops and hotels had signs 
newly painted in French, but that on most of them 
the European languages had been eliminated. 

"You will be amused by that," said Daoud Bey. 
"You see, when the war broke out, the government 
issued an order that no one in Turkey should use the 
language of a hostile nation. The French newspapers 
were suppressed, the French and English signs or- 
dered removed; people were forbidden to speak 
French, English, or Russian; and letters written in 
the three languages were simply burned. But they 
soon found out that the greater part of the population 
on this side of the Golden Horn speak only French, 
and no Turkish at all; so they had to let up. As for 
letters, that was simple. The American consul pro- 
tested; so just a week ago the papers printed a solemn 
order of the government that, although French, Eng- 
lish, and Russian were still barred, you might write 
letters in American!" 

Daoud Bey was a Turk of wealthy, prominent 
family — which is extraordinary in Turkey, where 
families rise and fall in one generation, and there is 

262 



CONSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE GERMANS 

no family tradition because there is no family name. 
Daoud, son of Hamid, was all we knew him by; just 
as I, to the Turkish police, was known as John, son 
of Charles. In that splendid idle way Turks have, 
Daoud had been made an admiral in the navy at 
the age of nineteen. Some years later a British 
naval commission, by invitation, reorganized the 
Turkish fleet. Now, it is difficult to pry wealthy 
young Turks loose from their jobs. The commission 
therefore asked Daoud Bey very politely if he would 
like to continue being an admiral. He answered: "I 
should like to very much, provided I never have to 
set foot on a ship. I can't bear the sea." So he is no 
longer in the navy. 

I asked him why he was not bleeding and dying 
with his compatriots in the trenches at Gallipoli. 

"Of course," said he, "you Westerners cannot 
be expected to understand. Here you buy out of 
military service by paying forty liras. If you don't 
buy out it amounts to the admission that you haven't 
forty liras — which is very humiliating. No Turk of 
any prominence could afford to be seen in the army, 
unless, of course, he entered the upper official grades 
as a career. Why, my dear fellow, if I were to serve 
in this war the disgrace would kill my father. It is 
quite different from your country. Here the recruiting 
sergeants beg you to pay your exemption fee — and 
they jeer at you if you haven't got it ! " 

At the foot of the hill there is a tangle of meeting 
streets — Step Street, that used to be the only way to 

263 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

clamber up to Pera; the wriggling narrow alleys that 
squirm through a Greek quarter of tall, dirty houses 
to infamous Five-Piastre and Ten-Piastre Streets in 
the vicious sailor town of Galata; the one street that 
leads to the cable tunnel, where the cars climb under- 
ground to the top of the hill — all opening into the 
square of Kara-keuy before the Valideh Sultan Keu- 
prisi, the far-famed Outer Bridge that leads to Stam- 
boul. White-frocked toll-collectors stood there in 
rippling rank, closing and parting before the throng, 
to the rattling chink of ten-para pieces falling into 
their outstretched hands. And flowing between them 
like an unending torrent between swaying piles, 
poured that bubbling ferment of all races and all re- 
ligions — from Pera to Stamboul, and from Stamboul 
to Pera. Floating silk Arab head-dresses, helmets, 
turbans of yellow and red, smart fezzes, fezzes with 
green turbans around them to mark the relative of 
the Prophet, fezzes with white turbans around them — 
priests and teachers — Persian tarbouches, French hats, 
panamas. Veiled women in whose faces no man looked, 
hurrying along in little groups, robed in tcharchafs of 
black and gray and light brown, wearing extravagantly 
high-heeled French slippers too big for their feet, and 
followed by an old black female slave; Arabs from 
the Syrian desert in floating white cloaks; a saint 
from the country, bearded to the eyes, with squares 
of flesh showing through his colored rags, striding 
along, muttering prayers, with turban all agog, while 
a little crowd of disciples pressed after to kiss his 

264 



CONSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE GERMANS 

hand and whine a blessing; bare-legged Armenian 
porters staggering at a smooth trot, bent under great 
packing-cases and shouting "Destour!" to clear the 
way; four soldiers on foot with new rifles; helmeted 
police on horseback; shambling eunuchs in frock coats; 
a Bulgarian bishop; three Albanians in blue broad- 
cloth trousers and jackets embroidered with silver; 
two Catholic Sisters of Charity walking at the head of 
their little donkey-cart, presented to them by the 
Mohammedan merchants of the Great Bazaar; a 
mevlevi, or dancing dervish, in tall conical felt hat and 
gray robes; a bunch of German tourists in Tyrolean 
hats, equipped with open Baedekers, and led by a 
plausible Armenian guide; and representatives of 
five hundred fragments of strange races, left behind 
by the great invasions of antiquity in the holes and 
corners of Asia Minor. Pera is European — Greek, 
Armenian, Italian — anything but Turkish. Where 
goes this exotic crowd that pours into Pera? You 
never see them there. 

A thousand venders of the most extraordinary 
merchandise — Angora honey, helva, loukoum of roses, 
kaytnak (made from the milk of buffaloes shut in 
a dark stable), obscene postal cards, cigarette-holders 
of German glass, Adrianople melons, safety-pins, car- 
pets manufactured in Newark, New Jersey, celluloid 
beads — moved among the crowd shouting their wares, 
bellowing, whining, screaming: "Only a cent, two 
cents — On paras, bech par ay a." 

To the right lay the Port of Commerce, crowded 
265 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

with ships, and the Inner Bridge beyond, all up the 
splendid sweep of Golden Horn. Outside the bridge 
was a row of pontoons placed there to guard the port 
from English submarines, and against the barrier the 
chirket haries — Bosphorus steamboats — backing pre- 
cipitously out with screaming whistles into the thick 
flock of caiks that scatter like a shoal of fish. Beyond, 
across the bright-blue dancing water, the coast of Asia 
rising faintly into mountains, with Scutari dotted white 
along the shore. Stamboul, plunging from that mag- 
nificent point, crowned with palaces and trees, into 
the sea. . . . From left to right the prodigious sweep 
of the city, and the great mosques: Agia Sophia, built 
by the Emperor Justinian a thousand years ago, all 
clumsy great buttresses of faded red and yellow; the 
Mosque of Sultan Selim, who conquered Mecca; the 
Mosque of Sultan Achmet; Yeni Valideh Djami, at 
the end of the bridge; Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent 
— he who was a friend of Francois Premier; Sultan 
Bayazid. . . . 

The floating drawbridge swung slowly open with 
much confused shouting and the tugging of cables 
by sputtering launches to allow the passage of a 
German submarine coming up from the Dardanelles. 
She was awash, her conning-tower painted a vivid 
blue with white streaks — the color most disguising 
in these bright seas; but a momentary cloud passed 
over the sun, and she stood out startling against the 
suddenly gray water. 

"It takes them about an hour to close the bridge," 
266 



CONSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE GERMANS 

said Daoud Bey, and drew me into an alley between 
stone buildings, where little tables and stools hugged 
the shade of the wall, and a shabby old Turk in flap- 
ping slippers and a spotted fez served ices. Outside 
all roar and clamor, and hot sun beating on the pave- 
ment — here cool, quiet peace. 

"Daoud Pasha!" said a laughing voice. It was 
a slender girl in a faded green feridje, with bare brown 
feet, and a shawl pinned under her chin, in the manner 
of the very poor, who cannot afford a veil. She could 
not have been more than fifteen; her skin was golden, 
and her black eyes flashed mischievously. 

"Eli!" cried Daoud, seizing her hand. 

"Give me some money!" said EH imperiously. 

"I have no small money." 

"All right, then, give me big money." 

Daoud laughed and handed her a medjidieh — and 
she gave a scream of pleasure, clapped her hands, and 
was gone. 

"Gypsy," said Daoud, "and the most beautiful 
girl in all Constantinople. Hamdi, a friend of mine, 
fell in love with her, and asked her into his harem. 
So she went to live at Eyoub. But two weeks later I 
came down here one day, and as I was taking my 
sherbet I heard a little voice at my elbow: 'Daoud 
Pasha, some money please.' It was Eli. She said 
she had tried to be a respectable married lady for 
fourteen days, because she really loved Hamdi. He 
was very kind to her — gave her clothes and jewels, 
and courted her like a lover. But she couldn't stand 

267 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

it any longer; begging on the streets was more fun — 
she loved the crowd so. So one night she let herself 
out of the harem door and swam across the Golden 
Horn!" He laughed and shrugged his shoulders: 
"You can't tame a chingani." 

We paid. "May God favor you!" the proprietor 
said gently, and a Turk sitting at our table bowed and 
mumbled: " Afiet-olsoun! May what you have eaten 
do you good!" 

Outside on the wharf where the catks were 
ranked, each boatman yelling as loud as he could, 
a blind old woman in rusty black crouched against 
the wall and held out her hand. Daoud dropped a 
copper in it. She raised her sightless eyes to us and 
said in a sweet voice: "Depart smiling." 

"Kach parava? How much?" said Daoud. A 
deafening clamor of voices shouted indistinguishable 
things. 

"Let us take the old man," said my friend, point- 
ing to a figure with a long white beard, burnt-orange 
skull-cap, red sash, and pink shirt open at the throat 
to show his hairy old chest. "How much, effendim ?" 
He used the term of respect which all Turks use toward 
each other, no matter what the difference in their ranks. 

"Five piastres," said the old man hopefully. 

"I pay one piastre and a half," answered Daoud, 
climbing into the catk. Without reply the caikji pushed 
off. 

"What is your name, my father?" asked Daoud. 

"My name is Abdul, my son," said the old man, 
268 



CONSTANTINOPLE UNDER THE GERMANS 

rowing and sweating in the sun. "I am born of Mo- 
hammed the Short-legged in the city of Trebizond on 
the sea. For fifty-two years I have been rowing my 
caik across the Stamboul Limani." 

I told Daoud to ask him what he thought of the 
war. 

"It is a good war," said Abdul. "All wars against 
the giaour are good, for does not the Koran say that 
he who dies slaying the infidel will enter paradise?" 

"You are learned in the Koran?" exclaimed 
Daoud. "Perhaps, you are a sheikh and lead prayers 
in the mosque." 

"Do I wear the white turban?" said the old man. 
"I am no priest; but in my youth I was a muezzin, 
and called to prayers from the minaret." 

"What should he know of the war?" I said. 
"It doesn't touch him personally." 

Daoud translated. 

"I have four sons and two grandsons in the war," 
said Abdul, with dignity. Then to me: "Are you an 
Aleman — a German — one of our brothers who do not 
know our language and do not wear the fez? Tell 
me, of what shape and build are your mosques? Is 
your Sultan as great as our Sultan?" 

I replied evasively that he was very great. 

"We shall win this war, inshallah — God willing," 
said Abdul. 

"Mashallah !" responded Daoud gravely, and I 
saw that his light European cynicism was a thin 
veneer over eight centuries of deep religious belief. 

269 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

OUR caik ran into a thick tangle of eaiks clamorous 
with shouting, arguing boatmen, Abdul standing 
upright and screaming: " Vardah! Make way, sons of 
animals ! Make way for the passengers ! You have 
no passengers, why do you block the landing-place?" 
We laid our piastre and a half on the thwart and leaped 
ashore in Stamboul. Through the narrow, winding 
street piled high with melons and vegetables and 
water-casks, and overhung by ragged awnings propped 
on sticks, we jostled an amazing crowd of porters, 
mullahs, merchants, pilgrims, and peddlers. In the 
Oriental way, no one moved from our road— we 
bumped along. 

Along a cross street a string of boys and young 
men — each one carrying a loaf of bread — marched 
by between double lines of soldiers. 

"Recruits," said Daoud Bey. Often we met a 
non-commissioned officer and two armed men prowling 
among the crowds, glancing sharply in the faces of 
the young men; they were looking for possible soldiers 
who had not yet been called. Shouts and the trampling 
of feet, angry bellows and screams of pain drew our 
attention to a side alley, where a hundred men and 
women of all races swirled against the front of a shop; 

270 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

fez tassels danced in the air, grasping hands leaped 
out and sank, choking voices yelled, and on the out- 
skirts two policemen beat any back they could reach 
— thwack ! thwack ! 

"Waiting to buy bread," explained Daoud. 
"Hundreds of places like that all over Constantinople. 
There's plenty of grain in Anatolia, but the army 
needs the freight-cars — so they say." 

I said it ought to be an easy matter to feed the 
city. 

"Possibly," he answered with ironical inflection. 
"Have you heard the rumor that the city officials 
are holding back the supply so as to get higher prices ? 
Base falsehood, of course — yet such things have hap- 
pened before. And then our German brothers are 
more or less responsible. They persuaded our govern- 
ment to take a census of the city — a thing which has 
never before been possible since the fifteenth century. 
But trust the Germans to find a way. The govern- 
ment took over the bakeries and closed them for three 
days, while it was announced that every one must 
apply for a bread-ticket in order to buy bread. By 
slow degrees they are getting us all registered — for a 
man must eat. Last evening, in the back streets of 
Pera, I came upon a bakery where the last load had 
just been distributed, with a howling mob outside 
still unprovided for. First they smashed the win- 
dows, in spite of the clubbing of the police, and then 
they began to tear down the Turkish flags hung out 
on all the houses to celebrate the fall of Novo-Geor- 

271 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

gievsk, crying: 'We don't care for victories! Give 
us bread ! ' " 

We sat cross-legged in the booth of Youssof Ef- 
fendi the Hoja, in the Misr Tcharshee, or Bazaar of 
Egypt, where drugs are sold. Dim light filtered through 
cobweb windows high up in the arched roof that 
covered in the bazaar — making a cool gloom rich 
with the smells of perfumes, drugs, herbs, and strange 
Oriental medicines, of coffee from Aden, of tea from 
southern Persia. Overhead the whitewashed arch 
was scrawled with immense black whorls and loops 
of prayers to Allah, and Esculapian snakes twisted 
into verses out of the Koran. Above the booth was an 
intricate cornice of carved wood, covered with spider- 
webs, and from this vague twilight depended all sorts 
of strange objects on chains: dervish beggar-bowls 
made from the brittle skin of sea animals, ostrich 
eggs, tortoise-shells, two human skulls, and what was 
evidently the lower jaw of a horse. On the counter 
and the shelves behind were crowded glass bottles 
and earthen pots full of crude amber, lumps of cam- 
phor, hashish in powder and in the block, Indian and 
Chinese opium and the weak opium of Anatolia, 
bunches of dried herbs to cure the plague, black pow- 
der for love philters, crystals of oil for aphrodisiacs, 
charms to avert the evil eye and to confound your 
enemies, attar of roses, blocks of sandalwood, and 
sandal oil. In the dark little room behind the shop 
were heaped bales and jars, so that when Youssof 

272 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

Effendi lighted his lamp it looked and smelled like the 
cave of the Forty Thieves. 

He stopped us, bowing, with the right hand 
sweeping down, and fluttering to lips and forehead 
again and again; a tall, dignified figure in a long 
caftan of gray silk, and fez with the white turban of a 
religious teacher wound about it — immaculate. A 
glossy black beard covered his powerful mouth and 
dazzling teeth, and he had dark, shrewd, kindly 
eyes. 

"Salaam aleykoum, Daoud Bey," said he softly. 
"Peace be with you." 

"Aleykoum salaam, Youssof Effendi," answered 
Daoud, rapidly making the gesture and touching lips 
and forehead. "Here is my friend from America." 

"Hosh geldin. You are welcome," said the Hoja 
courteously to me, with a constant motion of his hands 
to lips and forehead. He didn't say "salaam" which 
is only used between Mohammedans. The Hoja 
knew only Turkish. 

"Bedri!" he cried and clapped his hands, and a 
little boy scurried out from somewhere in the bowels 
of the shop. "Coffee, haidel ..." 

We sat sipping the sweet thick liquid, smoking 
in long wooden chibouks cigarettes that we rolled of 
choice tobacco from Samsoun, in the cool, fragrant 
gloom. 

"Is the effendim well?" murmured the Hoja 
gently, in the ritual of Oriental politeness; each sip 
we took, each puff at our cigarettes he touched his 

273 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

lips and forehead, and we to him. "May God make 
it pleasant to your stomachs." 

The Hoja was a powerful man in Stamboul. 
For twenty years he had been muezzin in the mosque 
of Zeirick Kilissi, which was once the church of St. 
Saviour Pantocrator, and in whose shadow still lies 
the verde antique sarcophagus of the Empress Irene; 
then a leader of prayers on Friday in the great mosques; 
a popular teacher and charm doctor; and finally sent 
for by Abdul Hamid to lead private prayers in Yildiz 
Kiosk, those long years the Sultan shut himself up 
there in fear of assassination. 

"I know many fables about the marvels of Amer- 
ica," said Youssof Effendi graciously. "There appear 
to be palaces taller than those raised by the djinni 
in ancient times, and I have heard there is a demon 
called Graft" — here his eyes twinkled — "who stalks 
through your streets and devours people, and is 
known in no other land. One day I shall go there, 
for I understand that there opium is worth its weight 
in gold." 

He looked from Daoud Bey to me. "You are 
different from us, you races of the West, " he remarked. 
"Daoud Bey is handsome, but he is over-refined and 
thinks too much. He will have nervous jumps some 
day. He should not smoke tobacco, but eat plenty 
of eggs and milk. Tell the American effendi that I 
think he does not think too much and is very happy. 
That is the way I am." 

I wanted Daoud to ask how many wives he had. 
274 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

The Hoja understood my ill-mannered curiosity and 
smiled. 

"Pekki! How many wives has the effendi?" 
he replied. "Does he think that it is any easier for 
a Mohammedan to support two wives than a Chris- 
tian ? Allah preserve us ! Women are expensive. I 
know but six friends who have more than one wife. 
When the Armenian slave dealers come by night to 
my harem from Scutari with a fair odalik to sell, I 
answer them with a proverb: 'How many bodies 
can live of one man's meat?' " 

"What does Youssof Effendi think of the war?" 

"The war?" he answered, and the evasive look 
on his face showed that I had touched on a subject 
in which he was deeply involved. "My son is in the 
trenches at Gallipoli. Allah send what he will ! One 
does not think of whether wars are good or bad. We 
are a fighting race, we Osmanlis." 

"Do the Turks—" I began. 

The Hoja interrupted me with a sputtering tor- 
rent of language. 

"You must not call us 'Turks,'" said Daoud. 
" 'Turk' means rustic clown — 'rube,' as you would 
say. We are not Turcomans, barbaric, bloodthirsty 
savages from Central Asia; we are Osmanlis, an an- 
cient and civilized race." 

The Hoja talked frankly of the Germans. "I do 
not like them," he said. "They have no manners. 
When an Englishman or an American has been one 
month in Turkey, he comes to my booth with hand to 

275 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

lips, to forehead, and greets me: 'Sabah sherifiniz hair 
ola.' Before he buys, he accepts my coffee and my 
cigarettes, and we talk of indifferent subjects, as is 
proper. But when the Germans come they salute as 
they do in their army, and refuse my coffee, and want 
to buy and be gone, without friendship. I do not sell 
any more to Alemanes." 

Later I observed many of the Germans around 
the city; there were hundreds of them — officers on 
leave, tourists, and civil officials. Often they vio- 
lated the delicate etiquette that governs Moham- 
medan life. They spoke to veiled women on the 
street; bullied merchants in the Great Bazaar; 
stamped noisily into mosques during the hour of 
prayer on Friday, when no European is allowed to 
enter, and once at a tekkeh of the Howling Dervishes 
I was present in the visitors' gallery, while two Ger- 
man officers read aloud passages from the Koran in 
German throughout the services — to the furious in- 
dignation of the priests. . . . 

We went up with Youssof Effendi through the 
intricate winding streets of Stamboul, plunging into 
passages lined with tiny Armenian shops, under the 
walls of the fortress-like khans built for the entertain- 
ment of strangers by the mothers of bygone Sultans, 
by secret paths across the quiet courtyards of the 
great mosques, where children played about deli- 
cately carved marble fountains in the shade of enor- 
mous ancient trees; down little streets that twisted 

276 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

between the wooden booths of the seal-makers and 
sellers of tesbiehs — bead-chains — where green vines 
fell like cascades from the roofs; into vast sun-smitten 
dusty squares, the site of Byzantine forums and of 
coliseums greater than Rome's; through winding al- 
leys of wooden houses with overhanging shahnichars, 
where there was only an occasional passer-by — a shrill- 
voiced peddler beating his donkey, a grave-faced 
imam, women hurrying along with averted faces. 

When we passed women Daoud began to talk 
German in a loud voice. 

"They think you are a German officer," he said, 
laughing, "and it makes a terrible hit. All the harems 
are learning German now, and a lieutenant from Berlin 
or Hanover is the romantic ideal of most Turkish 
women!" 

Half the people we met saluted the Hoja — saluted 
him humbly as a person of prominence and power. 
In the unending maze of covered streets which makes 
up the Great Bazaar, a double chorus of cries came 
from both sides: "Youssof Effendi, buy of me! See 
this beautiful chibouk! Honor me with your patron- 
age, Youssof Effendi !" In the Bechistan, that gloomy 
great square where are the jewels and precious metals, 
the gold-and-silver-inlaid weapons and ancient carpets, 
we moved from counter to counter in triumph, fol- 
lowed by the sheikh of the Bechistan himself. 

"What is the price of this?" asked the Hoja im- 
periously. 

"A Turkish pound, effendim" 
277 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

"Robber and thief," replied our guide calmly. 
"I will give you five piastres." He moved on, flinging 
back over his shoulder: "Dog of a Jew, we go and 
return no more!" 

"Ten piastres! Ten piastres!" screamed the 
man, while the sheikh berated him for his discourtesy 
to the great Youssof Effendi. . . . 

For me he beat down a nervous shouting sales- 
man on an amber chibouk, from two and a half pounds 
to twenty piastres. 

"Do not make me shout, Youssof Effendi!" he 
yelled, his voice breaking, and the sweat standing out 
on his brow. "You will give me apoplexy !" 

"Twenty piastres," said the Hoja calmly, in- 
exorably. 

Late in the morning we sat in the dark cubby- 
hole behind a little Greek bookshop near the Sublime 
Porte, looking at hand-illuminated Korans — Daoud 
Bey, myself, and the clever, pleasant proprietor. 
Enter a young policeman, in gray coat with red ep- 
aulets and a fez of gray astrakhan. He came to 
where we sat, sighed deeply, and began in a melancholy 
voice a long story in Turkish. Daoud translated. 

"I have eaten offal," said the policeman. "I 
have been greatly humiliated. Several days ago I 
observed Ferid Bey and Mahmoud Bey sitting in a 
cafe talking to an unveiled girl of the streets, who 
was a Greek. Ferid Bey came to me and said: 'You 
must arrest Mahmoud Bey.' 'Why for?' I asked. 

278 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

'Because he is talking piggishness to a girl.' I was 
very much surprised. 'I did not know that talking 
piggishness to a girl was against the law,' I said. 'I 
am a friend of Bedri Bey, the chief of police,' said 
Ferid Bey, 'and I demand that you arrest Mahmoud 
Bey for talking piggishness to that girl.' So I arrested 
Mahmoud Bey and took him to jail. 

"He was in prison for three days, because every- 
body had forgotten all about him; but at last the 
keeper of the jail telephoned Bedri Bey, and asked 
what to do with Mahmoud Bey. Bedri Bey replied 
that he knew nothing of the man or the matter, so 
why keep him in prison ? Therefore, they let Mahmoud 
Bey loose, and he telephoned at once to Bedri Bey, and 
made a complaint about being arrested. 'Talking 
piggishness,' said he, 'is no offense against the law.' 
Then Bedri Bey called me before him and applied 
epithets to me, like 'son of an animal,' and threatened 
to dismiss me. Together Mahmoud Bey and I went 
to arrest Ferid Bey. But he was gone, he and the 
girl together. Then Mahmoud Bey boxed my ears. 
I am humiliated. I have eaten offal." 

We dined in the restaurant of the Municipal 
Garden of the Petit Champs at Pera, to the blaring 
rag- time of the band. The striped awning over the 
terrace was gay in a flood of yellow light, and electric- 
lamps hanging high in the full-leaved trees made a 
dim, checkered shade on the people sitting drinking 
at iron tables, and the cosmopolitan parade that 

279 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

moved round and round the garden. Vague under 
the smoky radiance of an immense yellow moon, the 
Golden Horn glittered, speckled with the red and 
green lights of ships; beyond lay the dim, obscure 
mass of Stamboul, like a crouching animal. 

The diners were mostly Germans and Aus- 
trians — officers on leave, aide-de-camps on duty at 
the Seraskierat in full-dress Turkish uniform, civilian 
officials, and the highly paid workmen of the Krupp 
factories; many of them with wives and children, 
in comfortable bourgeois dinner-parties like the res- 
taurants of Berlin. But there were also Frenchmen 
with smartly dressed wives, English, Italians, and 
Americans. In the slowly moving throng outside 
under the trees, were Perote Greeks, Armenians, 
Levantine Italians, Turks of official rank; German 
submarine sailors, Germans of the Turkish navy in 
fezzes, and great rolling ruddy American sailors from 
the stationnaire Scorpion, towering in their white 
summer uniform head and shoulders above the crowd. 
It was hard to believe that, just beyond the reach of 
our ears, the great guns spat and boomed unceasingly 
day and night across the bitter sands of Gallipoli. . . . 

If I had only space to recount the Homeric battles 
of those American sailors! The German man-of- 
war's-men and soldiers were friendly, but the work- 
men and civilians very quarrelsome. Sometimes an 
intoxicated or excited Teuton would come over to 
the American table and begin an argument about 

280 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

munitions of war, or the Lusitania case; or a German 
officer in Turkish uniform would stop them on the 
street and insist on being saluted. The sailors an- 
swered nothing but insults, and then they answered 
with their fists, Anglo-Saxon fashion. I could write 
another article simply about the night that Seaman 
Williams broke the German lieutenant's head with 
a stone beer-mug, and was transferred back to the 
United States as being "unfit for diplomatic service." 
And then there is the wonderful history of the two 
sailors who laid out seventeen attacking Germans in 
a cafe, and were led back to the American Sailors' 
Club by congratulatory police, while the wounded 
foe were jailed for three days. . . . Respect and 
friendship was mutual between the American sailors 
and the Turkish police. . . . 

Afterward we got into a cab and drove down the 
steep, dark streets to the Inner Bridge; the cabman 
carefully shrouded his lamps, for lights on the bridges 
were forbidden on account of possible lurking British 
submarines. Stamboul was black — they were saving 
coal. Dim lamps in the interiors of little stores and 
cafes shed a flickering illumination on mysterious 
figures shrouded in the voluminous garments of the 
East, who drifted silently by on slippered feet. 

Youssof Effendi was in his favorite cafe in a 
street behind the Bayazid mosque. We sat there 
with him, talking and drinking coffee, and puffing 
lazily at our narghilehs — the gray, cool smoke that 

281 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

makes the sweat stand out on your forehead. . . . 
Later we walked through the darkness across the 
city, by ways known to him alone, through arched 
passages, broken walls, and mosque courtyards. One 
after the other on mighty minarets, the muezzins 
came out into the heavy night, and cried that quaver- 
ing singsong which carries so far, and seems the last 
requiem of an old religion and a worn-out race. 

Out of his great courtesy, the Hoja insisted on 
going with us to Pera; so we invited him to drink a 
coffee with us at the Petit Champs. On the open-air 
stage the regular evening vaudeville performance was 
going on — singing girls, dancing girls, American tramp 
comedian, Hungarian acrobats, German marionettes 
— the harsh voices, lascivious gestures, suggestive cos- 
tumes, ungraceful writhings of the Occident. How 
vulgar it seemed after the dignified quiet of Stamboul, 
the exquisite courtesy of Turkish life ! 

Some Turkish officers from the interior of Asia 
Minor, who had never before seen women publicly 
unveiled and showing their legs, sat gaping in the 
front row, alternately flushing with anger and shame 
and roaring with laughter at the amazing indecency 
of the civilized West. . . . The Hoja watched the 
performance attentively, but his polished politeness 
gave no sign of embarrassment. Soon it ended, and 
in spite of many protests on the Hoja's part, we walked 
down the hill to the bridge with him. He did not 
speak of the show at all. But I was curious to know 
his real opinion. 

282 



THE HEART OF STAMBOUL 

"It was very lovely," replied Youssof Effendi 
with the most suave courtesy: "I shall take my little 
granddaughter to see it. . . ." 

Down at the dark bridge the draw was open, to 
let pass a contraband ship full of coal and oil which 
had crept down the coast from Burgas. Now at night 
it is forbidden for all but high officers to cross the 
Golden Horn in caiks, so there seemed nothing to 
do but wait for the interminable closing of the draw. 
Daoud Bey, however, confidently led the way down 
to the landing-place. Suddenly, out of the shadow 
popped a soldier-patrol. 

"Dour! Stop!" cried the officer. "Where are 
you going?" 

Daoud turned on him rudely. " Wir sind Deutsche 
offizieren!" he bellowed. The man saluted hastily, 
and fell back into the dark. "The German always 
does it," chuckled Daoud. . . . 

Late at night we climbed once more up Pera Hill. 
In a dark side-street the crowd was already beginning 
to gather about the front of a bakery, to stand there 
until it opened in the morning. We were stopped at 
Tramway Street by a flock of tooting automobiles 
rushing up, and street-cars one after another with 
clanging bells. Through the dark windows we glimpsed 
white faces staring out, bandaged — another Red Cres- 
cent ship had arrived from the front, and they were 
hurrying the wounded to the hospitals. 



283 



AN INTERVIEW WITH A PRINCE 

SUNDAY we took the chirket-harie to Kadi-keuy 
across the Bosphorus, to call upon Achmet Effendi, 
Prince of the Imperial blood — a son of Abdul Hamid, 
and seventh in line for the Sultanate. In Turkey the 
eldest member of the reigning family succeeds; ac- 
cordingly, it is not very long since each Sultan, on 
coming to the throne, strangled as a matter of course 
his cousins, brothers, and uncles, and imprisoned all 
his sons except the Crown Prince — until the latter him- 
self reached the Caliphate, and released his brothers 
by poisoned coffee or the cord. In Prince Achmet's 
time family murder as a royal pastime had gone out, 
but imprisonment of sons was still in vogue. And 
for more than twenty years he was immured in a 
wing of the Palace of Dolmabagcheh on the Bospho- 
rus — shut there with his women and his slaves, no 
visitors allowed to see him, no newspapers to reach 
him, no breath of life nor any whisper of the outside 
world to quicken the sluggish air of the harem. When 
the revolution of the Young Turks overturned his 
father, he was set free — a fat, pasty little figure who 
had hardly learned to read and write, bewildered and 
lost in the tremendous swirl of modern life. 

He lived in the abandoned villa of an English- 
284 



AN INTERVIEW WITH A PRINCE 

man who had fled from Moda at the outbreak of the 
war. At the ring of the door-bell, a black grinning 
eunuch in shabby frock coat bowed low to Daoud 
Bey, and led us into the hideous mid- Victorian parlor; 
satin-ribbed brown wall-paper, black-walnut furniture 
upholstered in brilliant blue plush, a horrible water- 
color of Dover Cliff on an easel, and flowering ferns in 
a wooden model of a caik. That was funny and pa- 
thetic enough — the attempt of that exiled family to 
make for itself a background of home. But the prince 
had added his own belongings; cheap wooden taborets 
inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a rosewood Morris chair 
of art nouveau design with green-velvet cushions, and 
a number of rugs of slovenly make, of the most scream- 
ing cheap German colors. He asked us later to admire 
these; and confided to Daoud that he had sold the five- 
century old Chinese and Persian rugs which had car- 
peted his palace-prison, and bought these brighter, 
better ones. 

It was a long and elaborate ritual. First the 
eunuch carried word up-stairs that we wished to see 
his Highness. Then a sort of butler, with hand flut- 
tering to lips and forehead, salaamed us into chairs. 
He disappeared, and there were vague sounds of dis- 
turbance aloft. Fifteen minutes later the eunuch 
returned; his Highness would see us. A long wait. 
The majordomo, a tall, bearded man with an Adam's 
apple sticking out over his tight Prince Albert, en- 
tered smiling, bowing, saluting, with murmurs of 
"Salaam aleykoum, salaam effendim — " . He clapped 

285 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

his hands, and coffee and cigarettes appeared on a 
little tray, the coffee in little cups so hideously daubed 
with sticky colors that I doubted my eyes. 

"Painted by his Highness with colored inks," said 
the majordomo proudly. "His Highness also does 
landscape." Whereupon, he led us about the room 
and exhibited a dozen smears on pieces of isinglass, 
the kind of picture a very young child makes with 
his first box of colors. . . . 

We stood up, sat down, saluted, rose again, ac- 
companying every sip of coffee with flowery com- 
pliments. At the end of this, the cups were removed 
and the majordomo bowed himself out with hands 
folded across his stomach. Daoud whispered to me 
not to cross my legs, as that was the height of Turkish 
bad manners. 

Twenty minutes. A eunuch appeared and sum- 
moned us to follow, and we went out into the garden 
behind the house, to a little nook which the prince 
had made for himself with potted plants and cane 
chairs. There the majordomo rejoined us with more 
bowings and compliments. Fifteen minutes. A dis- 
tant handclap; out of the shrubbery two eunuchs 
leaped and stood beside the path; the majordomo 
jumped as if he had been shot, and hurried down the 
path to meet his royal master. And Achmet Effendi 
hove in sight. 

He was a dumpy, bloated little man with a pale, 
mottled face under his fez. A stiff, tiny mustache 
stood straight out on his upper lip. He wore a gray, 

286 



AN INTERVIEW WITH A PRINCE 

cutaway suit, a high, stiff collar, gray-silk Ascot tie 
with a horseshoe pin of blue glass stuck into it, and 
his fat feet were crammed into patent-leather shoes 
with violet-cloth tops, laced with yellow-silk ribbon. 
His mouth twitched nervously, and as he came up to 
where we were respectfully standing, he twisted his 
ringers in each other. He touched lips and forehead 
rapidly a few times, held out a hand as if to shake mine 
Western fashion, thought better of it and snatched 
it back — and sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair. 
We also sat down; he rose again quickly, making us 
rise, and tried another chair. Then he glanced at us 
suspiciously, swiftly, and fixed his glance over our 
heads. 

Daoud gave the customary salutations, to which 
his Highness responded in what Daoud said was 
illiterate Turkish. 

"I have brought my friend John, son of Charles, 
an American newspaper correspondent, to pay his 
humble respects to your Highness," said Daoud. 

"I never talk to reporters!" snapped Prince 
Achmet suddenly; and then realizing he had said an 
ungracious thing, flushed miserably, and followed it 
up: "I am greatly honored by his visit and yours. 
I am very fond of foreigners. Last year I tried to 
learn English, for I admire the English very much. 
But I could not make my brain concentrate upon it." 
He turned suddenly in my direction. "Peoutefa dil" 
said he. I looked at Daoud Bey to translate, but he 
was making extraordinary signs behind the prince's 

287 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

back. "Peoutefa di! Peoutefa di ! Peoutefa di!" 
cried Achmet Effendi in an agonized voice. 

"His Highness is saying that it is a 'beautiful 
day,' in English, you fool!" murmured Daoud. The 
prince colored with anger, Daoud glared, I was pros- 
trated. Ten minutes of strained silence. 

"The prince wants to know what New York is 
like," Daoud interpreted. 

I told of subways, elevated railroads, great crowds 
of people hurrying along narrow straight defiles, where 
the sun shone only an hour each day, so tall were the 
great buildings that hemmed them in — twenty stories, 
thirty stories, forty stories. ... As I enumerated 
these, the prince let his eyes travel up into the sky, 
mouth open, trying to realize my description. He 
gave it up, shook his head, and smiled. A dearth of 
conversation prevailed. The prince fidgeted, twisted 
his fingers. 

"You being a correspondent," he said finally, 
with a kind of nervous sarcasm, "perhaps can tell us 
some news." 

"Your Highness should know," I answered, 
"that in this war no one knows less news than a cor- 
respondent. ... But your Highness is an Osmanli 
of high rank in the councils of state. Your Highness 
should be able to tell us some news " 

" What ? " he interrupted haughtily, angrily : " You 
dare ask me that on our first day's acquaintance? 
You must know me for at least two years before you 

can put questions to me!" Again he was miserably 

288 



AN INTERVIEW WITH A PRINCE 

embarrassed, ashamed of his petty, nervous suspicion. 
"I know nothing of the war," he added desolately: 
"I am not in the councils of state." Poor helpless 
forlorn creature; hating the cruel world that had 
attacked his country, hating the Turks because they 
had ruined, deposed, imprisoned, and perhaps mur- 
dered his father. ... Of no importance, with no 
resources, unable to study mathematics or learn to 
run an automobile — both of which he had tried — 
moving vacantly and restlessly around his little uni- 
verse, and longing for some contact with the world 
of men — a Prince of the Empire ! 

I have been to Selamlik and seen the white- 
bearded, weakly-smiling, doddering old Sultan issue 
from Yildiz to go to prayers, with Enver Pasha, the 
real ruler of Turkey, by his side — the thirty-three- 
year-old minister of war who was once a street peddler 
— while the great dignitaries of the empire ran beside 
the carriage, and the gorgeous red-coated imperial 
guards shouted, " Padishah } m tchok yashal" I have 
wandered in the vast grimy corridors of the Seras- 
kierat, the war ministry, and furtively inspected the 
packing-cases still standing in the corridors; three 
times have the papers and valuables of the ministry 
been packed for instant flight, when the rumors of 
English victory at the Dardanelles ran about the 
city like wild-fire. ... In unsuspected attics and cel- 
lars I have interviewed Armenians who have hidden 
there for five months or more to escape "deporta- 

289 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

tion" — which means certain death in the deserts of 
Asia Minor. From the windows of the American 
Sailors' Club I've hailed the English prisoners as they 
were marched past — thin, exhausted, sick scarecrows 
of men, eyes sunken with failure and the sight of too 
much vain bloodshed. High Turkish officials have 
told me privately of their smouldering hatred for the 
Germans, their naive conviction that after the war 
the Germans shall withdraw, leaving "Turkey to 
the Turks. . . ." 

"We do not hate the Christians," said Youssof 
Effendi. "We hate only evil people. There are good 
Christians and bad Christians, just as there are good 
Osmanlis and bad Osmanlis; but many bad Chris- 
tians seem to come to Turkey. In the bazaar to-day, 
you asked if a string of beads was real amber; the 
Armenian merchant said it was, but I knew it was 
not. A Turk would not lie like that. Armenians and 
Greeks charge you four times the real price for things, 
because they see you are a foreigner; a Turk charges 
the same to foreigners as to Turks, and expects bar- 
gaining. The bad women of Pera and Galata are all 
Christians; there are no Turkish prostitutes. 

"Missionaries? The missionaries don't ask us 
whether we want them to come here, and force Western 
ideas upon us. We have seen how your people live 
in Pera, and it doesn't seem much better than our 
way of living. Your Christ teaches that love and 
kindness and mercy are better than brute force, and 
yet all that you have which is better than we have 

290 



AN INTERVIEW WITH A PRINCE 

is powerful armies . . . ! Jesus was a great prophet 
— we pray to him in our mosques. But he was no 
more the Son of God than Mahomet was the Son of 
God. We think your religion is blasphemy; but we 
do not try to change your religion. Yet you try to 
convert us to a faith that we consider inferior to ours. 
If Christians would only let us alone, we wouldn't 
massacre the Armenians. ..." 

A rich Armenian who lived at Buyukdere on the 
Bosphorus went deeper. 

"I agree thoroughly with the Turks," he re- 
marked. "If I were a Turk I should hate the Chris- 
tians. Turkey is not, cannot be a political state; it 
is a theocracy, and the only organic law is the Moham- 
medan religion. Therefore, all Turkish subjects who 
are not Moslems are necessarily outside the law, and 
a source of constant trouble. The Turk is absolutely 
honest in business dealings — his religion makes him 
so; but we Christians He and cheat with a clear con- 
science. No Moslem can exact interest — the Koran 
forbids it. So as a natural consequence all trade, 
banking— in fact economic power of every sort, is in 
the hands of Christian or Jewish foreigners, with 
whom the Turks' religion will not allow them to com- 
pete. From the Turkish point of view, there is only 
one solution — all people except Mohammedans must 
be driven from the empire. ... I myself would be 
deported if I didn't mind my own business and play 
fair with the Turk. I only cheat foreigners. 

"And yet they are so simple, so childlike in this 
291 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

mature world of cutthroats and adventurers, that they 
think they will get rid of the Germans, too, after 
the war! You and I know better. It is the end 
of the Turkish Empire — yes, it is the end, whichever 
side wins. . . ." 



292 



THE BURNING BALKANS 



RUMANIA IN DIFFICULTIES 

MY window, high up in the dazzling neo-French 
facade of the Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucarest, 
looks down on a little park smothered in almost tropical 
luxuriance of trees and flowers, where busts of minor 
Rumanian celebrities on marble columns stonily ignore 
each his marble wreath proffered by the languishing 
Muse kneeling on the pedestal. You've seen millions 
like them all over France. To the left lies the Atheneul, 
combining the functions of the Louvre, the Pantheon, 
and the Trocadero, and built to suggest the architec- 
ture of the Paris Opera. Its baroque dome bears aloft 
a frieze of gilt lyres, and the names of the great dead 
in gilt letters: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pushkin, 
Camoens, Beethoven, Racine, etc., and two or three 
Rumanians unknown to the West. Eastward as far 
as one can see, red-tile roofs and white-stone copings 
pile up, broken with vivid masses of trees — palaces and 
mansions and hotels of the most florid modern French 
style, with an occasional Oriental dome or the bulb 
of a Rumanian Greek church. It is like a pleasure 
city built by Frenchmen in the south, this little "Paris 
of the Balkans," whose Rumanian name, Bucureshti, 
means literally "City of Joy." 

At sunset the town wakes from the baking heat 
of a cloudless summer day. On the right the prin- 

295 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

cipal and smartest street, Galea Victoriei, winds roar- 
ing between the High-Life Hotel (pronounced "Hig- 
Liff") and the Jockey Club building — which might 
have been bodily transplanted from the Boulevard 
Haussman. All the world is driving home from the 
races down on the Chaussee — a combination of the 
Bois de Boulogne and the Champs Elysees — where 
it has seen the stable of Mr. Alexandre Marghiloman, 
chief of the Germanophile branch of the Conservative 
party, win the Derby as usual — one, two, three. The 
regular evening parade begins. An endless file of 
handsome carriages, drawn by superb pairs of horses, 
trots smartly by in both directions along the twisting, 
narrow street. The coachmen wear blue-velvet robes 
to their feet, belted with bright satin ribbons whose 
ends flutter out behind, so you can guide them right 
or left by pulling the proper tab. These are public 
cabs owned communally by their drivers, who are 
all members of a strange Russian religious sect ex- 
pelled from their own country; their belief requires 
that after they have married and had one child, they 
shall become eunuchs. ... 

Each carriage is the setting for a woman or two 
women, rouged, enamelled, and dressed more fan- 
tastically then the wildest poster girl imagined by 
French decorators. A dense crowd overflowing from 
the sidewalks into the street moves slowly from the 
Atheneul up past the King's palace to the boulevards 
and back again — extravagant women, and youths 
made up like French decadent poets, and army officers 

296 



RUMANIA IN DIFFICULTIES 

in uniforms of pastel shades, with much gold lace, 
tassels on their boots, and caps of baby-blue and 
salmon-pink — color combinations that would make a 
comic-opera manager sick with envy. They have 
puffy cheeks and rings under their eyes, these officers, 
and their cheeks are sometimes painted, and they 
spend all their time riding up and down the Galea 
with their mistresses, or eating cream puffs at Capsha's 
pastry-shop, where all prominent and would-be prom- 
inent Bucarestians show themselves every day, and 
where the vital affairs of the nation are settled. What 
a contrast between the officers and the rank and file 
of the army — strong, stocky little peasants who swing 
by in squads to the blare of bugles, excellently equipped 
and trained ! The numberless cafes and pastry-shops 
spill tables out on the sidewalk and the streets, crowded 
with debauched-looking men and women got up like 
chorus-girls. In the open cafe-gardens the gypsy 
orchestras swing into wild rhythms that get to be a 
a habit like strong drink; a hundred restaurants fill 
with exotic crowds. Lights flash out. Shop windows 
gleam with jewels and costly things that men buy for 
their mistresses. Ten thousand public women parade 
— for your true Bucarestian boasts that his city sup- 
ports more prostitutes in proportion than any other 
four cities in the world combined. . . . 

To look at it all you would imagine that Bucarest 
was as ancient as Sofia or Belgrade. The white stone 
weathers so swiftly under the hot, dry sun, the oily 
rich soil bears such a mellowing abundance of vegeta- 

297 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

tion, life is so complex and sophisticated — yet thirty 
years ago there was nothing here but a wretched vil- 
lage, some old churches, and an older monastery which 
was the seat of a princely family. Bucarest is a get- 
rich city, and modern Rumanian civilization is like 
that — a mushroom growth of thirty years. The fat 
plain is one of the greatest grain-growing regions in 
the world, and there are mountains covered with fine 
timber; but the mainspring of wealth is the oil region. 
There are oil kings and timber kings and land kings, 
quickly and fabulously wealthy. It costs more to 
live in Bucarest than in New York. 

There is nothing original about the city, nothing 
individual. Everything is borrowed. A dinky little 
German King fives in a dinky little palace that looks 
like a French Prefecture, surrounded by a pompous 
little court. The government is modelled on that of 
Belgium. Although all titles of nobility except in the 
King's immediate family were abolished years ago, 
many people call themselves "Prince" and "Count" 
because their forefathers were Moldavian and Wal- 
lachian boyars; not to speak of the families who trace 
their descent from the Emperors of Byzantium ! Poets 
and artists and musicians and doctors and lawyers 
and politicians have all studied in Paris — and of late 
Vienna, Berlin, or Munich. Cubism is more cubic 
and futurism more futuristic in Rumania than at 
home. Frenchified little policemen bully the market- 
bound peasants, who dare to drive across the Galea 
Victoriei and interrupt the procession of kept women, 

298 



RUMANIA IN DIFFICULTIES 

Cabarets and music-halls are like the less amusing 
places on Montmartre; you can see Revues based on 
dull French ones, copies of risque comedies straight 
from the Theatre Antoine, or the National Theatre — 
which imitates the Comedie Francaise, and looks like 
the Municipal Theatre at Lyons. A surface coating 
of French frivolity covers everything — without mean- 
ing and without charm. 

If you want to infuriate a Rumanian, you need 
only speak of his country as a Balkan state. 

"Balkan!" he cries. "Balkan! Rumania is not 
a Balkan state. How dare you confuse us with half- 
savage Greeks or Slavs ! We are Latins." 

One is never allowed to forget that; the news- 
papers insist every day that Rumanians are Latins — 
every day there is a reference to "our brothers, the 
French, or the Spaniards, or the Italians" — but really 
of purer blood than these "brothers," for the Ruma- 
nians are descendants of Roman veterans colonized in 
Transylvania by the Emperor Trajan. Some local 
writers complacently insist that Rumania is the in- 
heritor of the Roman Empire; in a square in Bucarest 
there is a fountain showing Romulus and Remus 
suckled by the wolf, and some of the public buildings 
are adorned with the Insignia, the Fasces, the Eagle, 
and "S. P. Q. R." ■ But those Roman colonists may 
have been originally drafted into the legions from Tar- 
sus, or the suburbs of Jerusalem, or south Germany. 
Add to that the blood of the native Dacians, a strong 
Slavic strain, Magyar, Vlaque, and a great deal of 

299 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

gypsy, and you have the Rumanian. ... He 
speaks a Latin language strongly impregnated with 
Slavic and Asiatic roots — an inflexible tongue to use, 
and harsh and unmusical to the ear. And he has 
Latin traits: excitability, candor, wit, and a talent 
for hysterical argument in critical situations. He is 
lazy and proud, like a Spaniard, but without a Span- 
iard's flavor; sceptical and libertine, like a French- 
man, but without a Frenchman's taste; melodra- 
matic and emotional, like an Italian, without Italian 
charm. One good observer has called Rumanians 
"bad Frenchmen," and another "Italianized gypsies." 
Shopkeepers and cabmen and waiters in restaurants 
are thieving and ungracious; if they can't cheat you 
they fly into an ugly rage and scream like angry mon- 
keys. How many times have Rumanian friends said 
to me: "Don't go to so-and-so's shop; he is a Ru- 
manian and will cheat you. Find a German or French 
place." 

It will be said that I have judged Rumanians 
by the people of Bucarest, and that Bucarest is not 
all Rumania. But I insist that the metropolis re- 
flects the dominant traits of any nation — that Paris 
is essentially French, Berlin essentially Prussian, and 
Bucarest thoroughly Rumanian. Sometimes there 
are peasants on the street; the men in white linen 
trousers, and shirts that fall to their knees, embroidered 
in delicate designs of flowers, the women in richly 
decorated linen skirts and blouses of drawn work ex- 
quisitely worked in color, chains of gold coins hang- 

300 



RUMANIA IN DIFFICULTIES 

ing around their necks. They fit into the comic-opera 
scheme of things. But one hour by automobile from 
Bucarest you come upon a village where the people 
live in burrows in the ground, covered with roofs of 
dirt and straw. The ground their burrows are dug in 
is owned by a boyar — a landowning noble — who keeps 
a racing stable in France, and they till his land for 
him. Two per cent of the population can read and 
write. There is no school there. Several years ago 
the proprietor himself built a school for his people, 
on condition that the government would take it over 
and support it; for three years now it has been used 
as a storehouse. 

These peasants eat nothing but corn — not be- 
cause they are vegetarians, but because they are too 
poor to eat meat. And the church provides frequent 
fasts, which are the subject of laudatory comments 
on "frugality and thrift" by satisfied landowners. 
The peasants are very religious, or superstitious, 
whichever you want to call it. For instance, they 
believe that if a man dies without a lighted candle in 
his hand to guide him through the dark corridors of 
death, he will not reach heaven. Now many people 
do die suddenly without the lighted candle; and here 
is where the church comes in. The country priest 
charges the dead man's family eighty francs to get 
him into heaven without the candle, and a certain 
sum yearly to keep him there. The priest also takes 
advantage of the vampire legend — a superstition, 
widely believed in Hungary, the Balkans, and south 

301 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Russia. If a peasant dies and others from his family 
or village follow in quick succession, the priest sug- 
gests that the dead man's spirit is a vampire. To 
lay this murdering ghost, the body must be exhumed 
in the dead of night (for it is strictly forbidden by 
Rumanian criminal law) and the heart torn out by 
an ordained priest, who drives a wooden peg through 
it. For this he charges a hundred francs. 

Once I went north on a night train which carried 
the Crown Prince's private car. It was a cold night, 
with a wind that ate into your bones. Yet all night 
long we looked from our window upon a line of wretched 
peasants standing beside the track, one every quarter 
of a mile, ragged and shivering, holding torches above 
their heads to do honor to their prince. . . . 

Never was a country so ripe for revolution. More 
than fifty per cent of the arable land is owned by less 
than ten per cent of the country's landowners — some 
four and a hah thousand big proprietors out of a 
population of seven and a half millions, seven-eighths 
of whom are working peasants; and this in spite of 
the fact that the government has been breaking up 
the big estates and selling land to the people since 
1864. The boyars and great landholders seldom live 
on their estates. Indeed, it is all they can do to keep 
up their hotels in Paris and Vienna, their houses in 
Bucarest, their villas at Nice, Constantza, and Sinaia, 
their winters on the Riviera, art galleries, racing 
stables, and general blowing of money in the four 
quarters of the world. One family I met posed as 

302 



RUMANIA IN DIFFICULTIES 

great humanitarians because they provided mud huts 
for their people, and paid them twenty cents a day — 
with the cost of living almost what it is in New Jersey. 
Add to this hopeless condition of affairs the fact that 
all voters in Rumania are divided into three classes, 
on the basis of their incomes, so that about one hundred 
peasants' votes equal one rich man's vote. There have 
been several revolutions in Rumania, the last one 
purely agrarian, in 1907; but since the conscript army 
system exists, it is easy to order peasants in the 
south to shoot down their northern brothers, and vice 
versa. You have only to see the Rumanian peasants, 
gentle, submissive, with almost effeminate dress, 
manners — even their national songs and dances are 
pretty and soft — to realize how frightful the pressure 
that would force them to revolt. 

What is the trend of Rumanian public opinion? 
There is no public opinion in Rumania. The peasants 
will fight for whatever their masters decide will give 
them the greatest country to exploit. It is simply 
another demonstration of how military service de- 
livers a nation bound hand and foot to ambitious 
politicians. So one must ask the politicians, and they 
will reply that Rumania will join the side that satis- 
fies "national aspirations" — as they call cupidity in 
the Balkans. 

Now the Rumanians came originally from 
Transylvania, and settled the flat plain north of the 
Danube which includes Bessarabia, and stretches 
eastward to the Black Sea. A race of herders and 

303 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

farmers, they spread far; southern Bucovina is full 
of Rumanians, and they are found in compact groups 
throughout Bulgaria, Serbia, the Banat, Macedonia, 
and Greece. The most civilized section, Transylvania, 
was early drawn into the Hungarian kingdom; Buco- 
vina was a present from the Turkish Sultan to the 
Emperor Joseph, and Bessarabia, twice Rumanian, 
was finally taken by Russia as the price of Rumanian 
independence after the battle of Plevna. And al- 
though many people now alive remember the passing 
of the Russian armies that freed Rumania from the 
Turk, they cannot forget the two million Rumanians 
who fell under the Russian yoke. It was partially 
to make up for the loss of that great province that 
Rumania stabbed Bulgaria in the back in 1913, 
and took away Silistria, where there was no Ru- 
manian population. When there is no other reason 
for territorial conquest, this kind of "national aspi- 
rations " is excused by Balkanians on "strategical 
grounds." 

Bessarabia was forcibly Russianized. The upper 
classes, of course, easily became Russian, but the 
prohibition of the Rumanian language in schools 
and churches had the effect of driving the peasants 
out of both — of making a brutalized and degraded 
race, who have lost all connection with or knowledge 
of their mother country. 

In Transylvania, the birthplace of the race, and 
the Banat beyond, there are some three million Ru- 
manians. But there, in spite of the desperate Hun- 

304 



RUMANIA IN DIFFICULTIES 

garian campaign to Magyarize the people as the Rus- 
sians did in Bessarabia, the racial feeling is strong and 
growing. The Transylvanians are rich and civilized; 
when the Rumanian tongue was banned in the higher 
schools and the churches, they fought a stubborn fight, 
crossing the mountains into Rumania for education, 
and spreading the nationalist propaganda at home and 
abroad so thoroughly that every Rumanian knows 
and feels for his oppressed brothers on the other side 
of the Carpathians, and you can travel across Hun- 
gary as far as Buda-Pesth and beyond without speak- 
ing any language but Rumanian. 

So the "national aspirations" of Rumania, on 
"ethnographical grounds," include Bessarabia, Buco- 
vina, Transylvania, and the Banat; and I have also 
seen a map in Bucarest, colored to show that Mace- 
donia should really belong to Rumania, because the 
majority of the population are Rumanians! 

All this does not excite the peasant to the verge 
of war on any side. But there is a mortal wrestling- 
match going on between pro-Teuton and pro-Ally 
politicians. How many obscure lawyers are now 
getting rich in the limelight of political prominence! 
In the Balkans politics is largely a personal matter; 
newspapers are the organs of individual men who 
have jockeyed themselves to be party leaders, in 
countries where a new party is born every hour over 
a glass of beer in the nearest cafe. For instance, La 
Politique is the organ of the millionaire Marghiloman, 
lately chief of the Conservative party and only par- 

30S 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

tially deposed. He was once so pro-French that it 
is said he used to send his laundry to Paris — but the 
Germans got him. His pro-Ally constituents split 
off under Mr. Filipescu, violently anti-German, whose 
organ is the Journal des Balkans. . . . Then there 
is the Independence Roumaine, property of the family 
of Mr. Bratianu, the premier — who was pro-German 
at the beginning of the war, but has become mildly 
pro-Ally — chief of the Liberal party now in power. 
And La Roumanie, mouthpiece of Mr. Take Ionescu, 
the leader of the Conservative Democrats, who is the 
most powerful force in the country on the side of 
the Entente Powers. The Conservatives are the great 
proprietors; the Liberals are the capitalists; the 
Conservative Democrats are about the same as our 
Progressives, and the peasants' Socialist Agrarian 
party doesn't count. But all internal programmes 
were forgotten at the question: On which side shall 
Rumania enter the war ? 

Two years ago old King Carol summoned a coun- 
cil of ministers and party leaders at Sinaia, and made 
a speech advocating immediate entrance on the side 
of the Central Powers. But when a vote was taken, 
only one man present was with the King. It was 
the first time his royal will had ever been thwarted, 
and a few days later he died without returning to the 
capital. Ferdinand, the present King, is in the same 
predicament, and, what is more, he has an English 
queen. ... It is a great game being fought over 
the heads of the King and the people by powerful 

306 



RUMANIA IN DIFFICULTIES 

financial interests, and the ambitions of political jug- 
glers. 

Meanwhile, a steady stream of Russian gold has 
poured into willing pockets, and the methodical Teu- 
tons have been creating public sentiment in their 
own inimitable way. Thousands of Germans and 
Austrians descended upon Bucarest in holiday attire, 
their wallets bulging with money. The hotels were 
full of them. They took the best seats at every play, 
violently applauding things German and Rumanian, 
hissing things French and English. They printed 
pro-German newspapers and distributed them free 
to the peasants. Restaurants and gambling casinos, 
dear to the Rumanian heart, were bought by them. 
German goods at reduced prices flooded the shops. 
They supported all the girls, bought all the cham- 
pagne, corrupted all the government functionaries 
they could reach. ... A nation-wide agitation was 
started about "our poor oppressed brothers in Russian 
Bessarabia" — in order to divert attention from Transyl- 
vania and stir up anti-Russian feeling. 

To the Rumanian Government, Germany and 
Austria offered Bessarabia, including even Odessa, and 
Bucovina would also be ceded if she insisted. The 
Allies offered Transylvania, the Banat, and the Buco- 
vina plateau north of her frontier. Although there 
was much talk in the press about "redeeming lost 
Bessarabia," the Bessarabian question was really not 
a vital one, while the Transylvanian question was 
burning and immediate. Moreover, the Rumanians 

3°7 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

know that Russia is a coming nation, and that forty 
years from now, even if defeated in this war, she will 
be there just the same, and stronger; while Austria- 
Hungary is an old and disintegrating empire, whose 
drive will be no longer eastward. 

Three times since the war began Rumania ten- 
tatively agreed with the Allies to enter — and three 
times she drew back: once in the early spring, when 
Russia was on the Carpathians, and again when Italy 
entered. The last time was when I saw Mr. Take 
Ionescu at midnight of the day that Bulgaria signed 
her agreement with Turkey. 

"I think Bulgaria has chosen her side," he said 
very gravely. "We are not such babies as to believe 
that Turkey would give up any territory for nothing. 
The Central Powers will drive through Serbia — only 
we can stop that. And I am in a position to tell you 
that Serbia can claim our help if she is attacked. The 
Austrians have closed their frontier to us, and four 
hundred thousand men are said to be massed ready 
to march on Bucarest. It is a bluff — a bluff to force 
the resignation of the Bratianu cabinet, and the calling 
of Mr. Marghiloman to form a ministry — which would 
mean a German policy. Even if the Bratianu cabinet 
fell — which I doubt, for he is not for war — only he 
and the King working together could pave the way 
for Marghiloman. And that is impossible." 

Three weeks later the German drive on Serbia 
began; but once more Rumania held aloof. 



308 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

BUT the key to the Balkans is Bulgaria, not Ru- 
mania. Leaving Bucarest on a dirty little train, 
you crawl slowly south over the hot plain, passing 
wretched little villages made of mud and straw, like 
the habitations of an inferior tribe in Central Africa. 
Gentle, submissive-looking peasants in white linen, 
stand gaping stupidly at the engine. You stop at 
every tiny station, as if the Rumanian Government 
were contemptuously indifferent of any one going to 
Bulgaria, and at Giurgiu there is an unnecessarily rigid 
examination by petty despotic customs officials, who 
make it as disagreeable as possible to leave the coun- 
try. 

But across the yellow Danube is another world. 
While the steamer is yet a hundred yards from the 
landing-stage somebody hails you with a grin — a big 
brown policeman who has been in America, and whom 
you saw once as you passed that way two months 
ago. Good-natured, clumsy soldiers make a pretense 
of examining your baggage, and smile you a welcome. 
As you stand there a well-dressed stranger says in 
French: "You are a foreigner, aren't you? Can I 
do anything for you?" He is not a guide; he is just 
a passenger like yourself, but a Bulgarian and there- 
fore friendly. It is wonderful to see again the simple, 

309 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

flat, frank faces of mountaineers and free men, and to 
nil your ears with the crackling virility of Slavic speech. 
Bulgaria is the only country I know where you can 
speak to any one on the street and get a cordial answer 
— where if a shopkeeper gives you the wrong change 
he will follow you to your hotel to return a two-cent 
piece. Never was sensation more poignant than our 
relief at being again in a real man's country. 

The train labors up through Rustchuk — half 
Turkish with its minarets, spreading tile roofs, peas- 
ants wearing baggy trousers, red sashes, and turbans 
— into mighty uplands that roll south ever higher 
toward the mountains. A marriage procession passes; 
four ox-carts full of uproarious men and girls wav- 
ing paper streamers, and gay with embroideries of 
white linen, chains of gold coins, bright-colored blan- 
kets, bunches of grapes, and flowers. Ahead a man rides 
a mule, beating a drum, and a wild squadron of youths 
on horseback scurry shouting over the plain. . . . 
Night falls — the cold night of high altitudes — and 
you wake in the morning hurrying down a winding 
gorge beside a mountain torrent, between high hills 
of rocks and scrub, where herdsmen in brown home- 
spun pasture their goats against the sky; past ravines 
in which little villages are caught, irregular and Turkish, 
their red roofs smothered in fruit-trees; until finally 
the mountains break, and you see Sofia crowning her 
little hill like a toy city of red and yellow, topped by 
her golden dome and overshadowed by her moun- 
tain. 

310 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

Nothing could be more different from Bucarest 
than Sofia. A sober little town of practical, ugly 
buildings, and clean streets paved with brick. Tele- 
phone-wires run overhead; many street-cars clang 
along. Except for an occasional ancient mosque or 
Byzantine ruin, and a sudden glimpse of shabby 
squares full of peasants in turbans squatting on their 
heels, it might be a bustling new city of the Pacific 
Northwest. There is one hotel where literally every- 
body goes — the Grand Hotel de Bulgaria; next door 
is the Grand Cafe de Bulgaria, where journalists make 
news, magnates plot and combine, lawyers blackmail, 
and politicians upset ministries. If you want an in- 
terview with the premier or one of the ministers — in 
one case I know of, with the King — you get a bell-boy 
of the Grand Hotel to call him up on the telephone. 
Or if you don't want to do that, simply take a table 
in the Grand Cafe — they will all come in some time 
during the day. . . . Sofia is a little place, friendly 
and accessible. The unpretentious Royal Palace is 
right across the street; the National Theatre one block 
down; the House of Parliament, or Sobranie, two blocks 
in the other direction, near the Foreign Office, and the 
Cathedral and Holy Synod just beyond. Every one of 
any importance lives in a radius of five blocks. . . . 

Toward evening the town gets on its best clothes, 
and strolls out the avenue of the Tsar Liberator to 
Prince Boris Park. It is a solemn domestic little 
parade of country people with their wives, daughters, 
sweethearts, and all the children. The women are 

3" 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

comfortably unattractive, and they dress in last 
year's rural styles. Many officers mingle with the 
crowd — officers who wear smart, practical uniforms 
built for campaigning, and look as if they knew how 
to fight. Squads of burly soldiers in peaked caps and 
boots tramp stiffly by, roaring slow, hymn-like songs 
such as you hear in the Russian army. . . . 

Darkness brings a chill — for Sofia is a thousand 
feet up — and sharp on the stroke of eight the crowd 
scatters home to dinner. There is no restaurant ex- 
cept your hotel, and the food has no subtlety — ham 
and eggs and spinach being the Bulgarian's favorite 
dish. Afterward you can sit in the National Casino 
in the Public Gardens, and drink beer to the strains 
of a fine military band, or you can listen to inter- 
minable Bulgarian dialogues at the Municipal Theatre. 
There is only one music-hall, called "New America," 
a dreary place where heavily humorous comedians 
and unshapely dancers delight the guffawing peasants 
who have come to town on a jag. 

The number of people who speak English is 
amazing. Almost all the political leaders have been 
educated at Roberts College, the American missionary 
school in Constantinople. Roberts College has had 
such an influence on Bulgaria, that after the con- 
solidation of the country and establishment of the 
kingdom in 1885, it was hailed as "cradle of Bulgarian 
liberty." That's why Sofia is so American, and that's 
why so many American methods are used in Bulgarian 
politics — even our kind of graft ! But there are more 

312 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

powerful influences. Bulgaria was nearest to Con- 
stantinople, and longer subject to the Turks than any- 
other Balkan country — the language is full of Turkish 
words, and the popular life of Turkish customs. Then 
Russia's freeing her in 1876 turned the entire trend of 
Bulgarian thought toward her mighty Slav brother. 
There was also a group of intellectuals, fighting to free 
Macedonia, who imbibed republican ideals in France. 
And lastly, Bulgarian army officers, scientists, teachers, 
journalists, and politicians, for the last fifteen years 
have studied almost exclusively in Germany. 

An hour by automobile from Sofia lies a typical 
Bulgarian village. The fields around it are owned 
and farmed communally by the inhabitants, except 
for the lands belonging to the monastery at the top 
of the hill. A wild mountain stream tumbling down 
the ravine turns the wheels of fourteen mills, where 
the peasants grind their corn; and since the mills all 
charge the same price, and the highest mill had no 
trade at all, the peasants and the monks together 
have agreed to abolish all mills, and build a single 
large one run by electricity generated by the stream, 
to be owned in common by the village. Broad, com- 
fortable houses with tile roofs, built of wood or stone 
or baked clay, straggle along the cobbled streets. 
Every one seems happy and prosperous, for in Bul- 
garia each peasant can own five inalienable acres of 
land, and, as in Serbia, there are no rich men. At the 
end of the street is a big, fine public school, with room 

313 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

for all the children, and teachers trained in Germany. 
Telegraph and telephone, train and automobile road 
connect it with the city. And these evidences of 
organization and progress are to be seen all over 
Bulgaria. King Ferdinand and the group of scientific 
experts with which he has surrounded himself are 
chiefly responsible for all this. The Bulgars are loyal, 
honest and easily disciplined, in contrast to the an- 
archistic Serbs. Centuries of Turkish tyranny have 
helped to prepare them for the hand of the organizer. 

I know three derisive stories told by the peasants 
of other Balkan peoples about Bulgars for seven hun- 
dred years, which illustrate the Bulgarian character 
better than anything I could say. 

A Bulgar who had been mowing late in his fields 
went home at night with his scythe over his shoulder. 
Coming to a well, he looked down and saw the moon 
reflected in it. "Good God!" he cried, "the moon 
has fallen into the well. I must save it!" So he put 
his scythe into the water and pulled. But the scythe 
caught in the rocks of the well. He pulled and pulled 
and pulled. Suddenly the rock gave way and he 
fell on his back. Above him in the sky was the moon. 
"Ha," said he with satisfaction, "I have rescued the 
moon!" 

Four Bulgars walking across the fields came to 
a pond with a willow-tree bending over it. Wind 
rustled the leaves and the peasants stopped to look 
at it. "The tree's talking," said one. "What is it 
saying?" The others scratched their heads. "It 

3i4 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

probably says that it wants a drink," replied another. 
Filled with pity for the poor thirsty tree, the Bulgars 
climbed out on the branch and weighed it down into 
the water. It broke and they all drowned. 

The Bulgarian army, so goes the story, had been 
besieging Constantinople for two years without the 
slightest result. They took counsel together and de- 
cided to push down the wall. So the soldiers strung 
themselves all around the city with their backs to the 
wall and began to push. They pushed and sweated 
with all their strength — they pushed so hard that 
their feet began to sink into the ground. Feeling 
something give way, the whole army shouted: "Just 
a little more now ! Keep on pushing ! She's moving ! " 

The Bulgarians were originally a Mongolian race, 
who invaded the Balkan Peninsula in the seventh 
century and mingled with the Slavs they found there. 
Under the legendary Tsar Simeon they erected by 
conquest an ephemeral "empire," which extended 
from Adrianople to the mouths of the Danube, north- 
west so as to include Transylvania and all of Hun- 
gary, then south to the Adriatic, taking in Bosnia, 
Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Epirus, 
and Thessaly — and east to Thrace. Two hundred 
years later, a Serbian "empire" under the mythical 
Tsar Dushan had conquered the same territory and 
subjugated the Bulgars. In the thirteenth century 
the Bulgars predominated again, and in the four- 
teenth the Serbs had their turn. Twice during this 

31S 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

time Bulgarians laid siege to Byzantium. I mention 
this to explain Bulgarian "national aspirations" on 
"historical grounds" — like all Balkan "aspirations," 
they are practically boundless. 

But the Bulgars are really very simple people, 
without guile. Why, then, did they enter the war 
on the side of Germany and Austria? And to go 
further back, why did they break the Balkan Alliance 
and provoke the second Balkan War? It is again a 
question of "aspirations." 

The Macedonian question has been the cause of 
every great European war for the last fifty years, and 
until that is settled there will be no more peace either 
in the Balkans or out of them. Macedonia is the most 
frightful mix-up of races ever imagined. Turks, 
Albanians, Serbs, Rumanians, Greeks, and Bulga- 
rians live there side by side without mingling — and 
have so lived since the days of St. Paul. In a space 
of five square miles you will find six villages of six 
different nationalities, each with its own customs, 
language, and traditions. But the vast majority of 
the population of Macedonia are Bulgars; up to the 
time of the first Balkan War no intelligent Greek 
or Serbian or Rumanian ever denied this. Almost 
all Bulgaria's great men have come from Macedonia. 
They were the first people, when Macedonia was a 
Turkish province, to found national schools there, 
and when the Bulgarian Church revolted from the 
Greek Patriarch at Constantinople — no other Balkan 
Church is free — the Turks allowed them to establish 

316 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

bishoprics, because it was so evident that Macedonia 
was Bulgarian. Ambitious Serbian nationalists fol- 
lowed the Bulgarian example of establishing schools 
in Macedonia, and sent comitadjis there to fight the 
Bulgarian influence; but Serbian scientists and polit- 
ical leaders recognized for a century that Macedonia 
was peopled with Bulgarians. The Serbians did not 
spread south; they came from the north and spread 
east through Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia, and be- 
yond Trieste — and that way their logical ambitions lie. 

During the last years of Balkan turmoil under the 
Ottomans, when the Great Powers were bawling for 
reform in the European vilayets, and the end of the 
Turkish Empire was in sight, Greece also sent comitad- 
jis to Macedonia to wage an underground bandit 
warfare on the Serbs and Bulgars, with the hope of 
eventually getting a slice. But up to the outbreak 
of the Balkan War no responsible Greek ever dared 
to claim Macedonia on any other but "historical" 
grounds. Constantinople, parts of Thrace, Asia 
Minor, and the European littoral of the ^Egean and 
Black Seas were claimed by Greece because Greeks 
lived there. But that was all. 

Even in the treaties of the Balkan Alliance that 
preceded the war of 191 2, Serbia recognized Mace- 
donia as Bulgarian. Mr. Milanovitch, the Serbian 
premier who helped draw the treaties, said: "There 
are districts which cannot be disputed between us. 
Adrianople ought to go to Bulgaria. Old Serbia north 
of the Char Planina Mountains ought to go to Serbia. 

317 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Most of Macedonia will be Bulgarian. But a strip of 
eastern Macedonia ought to be given to Serbia. And 
the best thing will be to leave the division to the Em- 
peror of Russia as arbitrator." And this was inserted 
in the treaty. Greece also accepted the principle of 
Bulgarian dominance. 

When the Balkan conflict exploded, Bulgaria, 
with her superior army, was to leave a strong force in 
Macedonia, and aid Serbia with more troops if she 
found things difficult. But, on the contrary, it was 
Serbia who sent aid to the Bulgars in Thrace; this, 
Serbia called "the first violation of the agreement." 
Adrianople fallen, the Bulgars pressed on, amazed at 
their success. They said they would stop at a line 
drawn through Midia on the Black Sea to Enos on 
the i^gean; but the Turks tried so frantically to 
make peace that they broke the armistice, and drove 
straight for Constantinople. Only Tchataldja stopped 
them, and they might finally have stormed that if 
events in their rear hadn't taken a disquieting turn. 

In the meanwhile the Serbians and Greeks, who 
had occupied all of Macedonia, Epirus, and Thessaly, 
were jealous of the boundless Bulgar ambition. Noth- 
ing in the Balkan Alliance had given Bulgaria the 
right to seize the capital of the Eastern world. To- 
gether Greece and Serbia had conquered the western 
vilayets, and they didn't see why they should give up 
territory fairly won to any powerful Balkan Empire — 
no matter what the treaties were. So they made a 
secret treaty and quietly went to work to Grecianize 

318 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

and Serbianize their new territories. A thousand 
Greek and Serbian publicists began to fill the world 
with their shouting about the essentially Greek or 
Serbian character of the populations of their different 
spheres. The Serbs gave the unhappy Macedonians 
twenty-four hours to renounce their nationality and 
proclaim themselves Serbs, and the Greeks did the 
same. Refusal meant murder or expulsion. Greek 
and Serbian colonists were poured into the occupied 
country and given the property of fleeing Mace- 
donians. Bulgarian school-teachers were shot with- 
out mercy, and Bulgarian priests given the choice of 
death or conversion to the Orthodox religion. The 
Greek newspapers began to talk about a Macedonia 
peopled entirely with Greeks — and they explained the 
fact that no one spoke Greek, by calling the people 
"Bulgarophone" Greeks or "Vlaquophone" Greeks. 
The Serbs more diplomatically called them "Mace- 
donian Slavs." The Greek army entered villages 
where no one spoke their language. "What do you 
mean by speaking Bulgarian?" cried the officers. 
"This is Greece and you must speak Greek." Re- 
fusal to do so meant death or flight. 

Bulgaria concluded a hasty peace with the Turks 
and turned her attention westward. The Serbs and 
Greeks were evasive — they declared the Balkan Al- 
liance had been broken by their ally. Bulgaria called 
upon the Tzar to arbitrate, but Serbia, in possession 
of far more than she ever had dreamed of gaining, 
realized that she had powerful friends: Russia, alarmed 

319 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

at the gigantic ambition of her protege, and Austria, 
who wanted no powerful state in the Balkans. Finally 
Tzar Nicholas agreed to settle the question; but just 
as the two delegates were about to start for St. Peters- 
burg, Bulgaria took a step that justified the fears of 
the Great Powers, alienated the world's sympathy, 
and lost her Macedonia. Without warning, her armies 
suddenly attacked the Serbs and the Greeks and 
marched on Salonika. The Bulgarian people was not 
consulted. The news came as a shock to the cabinet, 
whose policy was one of conciliation and peace. Con- 
sternation and fury broke loose in Sofia. Who had 
given the order? There was only one person who 
could have done so, and that was King Ferdinand. 

King Ferdinand is a regular romantic Balkan 
King. He perpetually sees himself riding into Con- 
stantinople on a white horse — the Tzar of an im- 
mense, belligerent empire. And as I write this he has 
again hurled his people against their will into a war 
from which they cannot emerge except as losers. 

I saw it all. I was in Sofia when the Entente 
Powers made their offer, and from then off and on 
until the end. The Allies offered as the price of in- 
tervention all of Serbian Macedonia to the Char 
Planina Mountains, Thrace, and diplomatic support 
for the recovery of Grecian Macedonia and Silistria. 
The Central Powers would give Macedonia, part of 
Serbia, Silistria, free access to Cavalla and Salonika, 
and a slice of Turkey to be ceded immediately. Ger- 
many told Bulgaria that she need only effect a junc- 

320 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

tion with the German forces through Serbian Mace- 
donia, and then she could turn all her attention to 
occupying these territories; while the Allies wanted 
her to attack the Turks, and wait for compensation 
until after the war. The Bulgars clamored for im- 
mediate occupation. . . . The Allies replied that 
they would guarantee her countries for her by occupy- 
ing the line of the Vardar with Allied troops. But the 
Bulgarian Government was sceptical of promises to 
be redeemed "after the war." 

The premier, Mr. Radoslavov, said on July 15: 
"Bulgaria is prepared and ready to enter the war im- 
mediately absolute guarantees can be given her that 
. . . she will attain . . . the realization of her national 
ideals. The bulk of these aspirations are comprised 
in Serbian Macedonia, with its Bulgarian population 
of one and a half millions. It was pledged and as- 
signed to us at the end of the first Balkan War, and 
it is still ours by right of nationality. When the 
Powers of the Triple Entente can assure us this terri- 
tory, and assure us that our minor claims in Grecian 
Macedonia and elsewhere will be realized, they will 
find us ready to march with them. But these guaran- 
tees must be real and absolute. No mere paper ones 
can be accepted. Only certainty on this point can 
induce our people again to pour out their blood." 

In that he had the country with him, for there is 
a very decided public opinion among the Bulgarian 
peasants. In the first place more than half a million 
Bulgarians fled from persecution in Macedonia under 

321 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

Turks, Greeks, and Serbs and were scattered through- 
out the villages of Bulgaria, forever preaching the lib- 
eration of their country. In the middle of the summer 
half the population of Sofia was composed of Mace- 
donian refugees, and you could visit a camp in the 
outskirts of the city where sixteen thousand of them 
lived under tents, at great expense and annoyance to 
the government. While I was in Sofia in September, 
there arrived five thousand Bulgarians who had been 
taken prisoners by the Austrians after being forced 
to serve in the Serbian army — returned with the 
compliments of the Emperor Franz Joseph. Every 
day the press was full of bitter tales brought by the 
refugees, and expressions of hatred against the Ser- 
bians; the Serbian press responded as bitterly, ac- 
cusing the Bulgarians of raiding across the frontier, 
burning and slaughtering. Both were true. To offset 
this hatred there was the traditional love and grate- 
fulness — very strong among the peasants — to Russia 
the Liberator, and the memory of the generation who 
had seen her armies rout the Turks. 

Bulgarian statesmen are just as they are in Ru- 
mania; they play the game of personal ambition and 
personal profits — with the important difference that 
in Bulgaria they must wheedle the people, and are 
subject to an unscrupulous and irresponsible monarch 
who has real royal power. All Bulgarians were agreed 
on the programme of regaining Macedonia; they 
only differed on the question of which group of Powers 
could give it to them. As Mr. Joseph Herbst said to 

322 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

me: "If Zululand would give us Macedonia we would 
march with Zululand I " A bitter and exhausting 
struggle went on between the two parties — between 
hatred of the Serbs and love for Russia. The Rado- 
slavov government showed itself benevolent toward 
the Central Powers in a hundred ways — for instance, 
by allowing the military censorship to suppress six 
pro-Ally newspapers on the ground that they were 
"bought with Russian gold." 

By an agreement of all political parties at the 
outbreak of the European war, power to act was left 
in the hands of the government, and the Sobranie 
adjourned indefinitely. But as the government's 
attitude became denned, the growing opposition de- 
manded the calling of Parliament to consider the 
country's position. This the King absolutely refused 
to do, for he knew that the majority of the country 
was still pro-Ally. In its desperation the Liberal 
government was forced to a trick. The provinces 
of New Bulgaria were electing their first deputies, 
and they were so gerrymandered that all the twenty 
deputies were Liberals. How the voters felt about it 
was made plain when a confidential man journeyed 
south to find out what side the peasants would like 
to fight on. "You give us guns first," they replied 
threateningly, "and we'll show you which side we'll 
fight on!" In spite of the twenty, however, there 
was still a majority against the Germans when Bul- 
garia went to war. 

As I passed through Sofia in the middle of August 
3 2 3 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the pro- Ally sympathizers were jubilant. Mr. Guena- 
diev, leader of the Stamboulovist party, seemed to 
think Bulgaria would accept the last offer of the 
Entente Powers, to which Serbia had conditionally 
agreed. Mr. Guechov, chief of the Nationalists, 
talked of a coming demonstration in force by the op- 
position, to compel the summoning of the Sobranie. 
And Mr. Malinov of the Democratic party believed 
that his country knew how fatal to Bulgarian pre- 
dominance would be the German drive eastward. 

But when I returned two weeks later all was 
changed. The Duke of Mecklenburg had twice visited 
the King, the Turco-Bulgarian secret treaty had 
been signed, the first gold instalment of an immense 
German loan had arrived, and Mr. Guechov told 
me that the Central Powers were now urging Bulgaria 
to attack Rumania, in case attempted negotiations 
between Austria and Serbia came off. "If the Ger- 
mans come through Serbia to our frontier," said Mr. 
Guenadiev, "what can our small army do against 
them? We do not want to be another Belgium." 
A politician who had once told me with glowing ap- 
proval how the peasants loved Russia, now seemed 
lukewarm. "The peasants are very simple folk," 
said he; "they remember Russia the Liberator, but 
they are not intelligent enough to realize that freeing 
Bulgaria was merely a step in the Russian march 
toward Constantinople. You and I know better; we 
understand that the peasants will do what they are 
told, and that a people needs thoughtful leaders." 
And he hurried away with an important, furtive air, 

3 2 4 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

In the first week in September the Opoltchenic, 
or Macedonian Legion, composed of refugees, was 
called to the colors "for forty-five days' training." 
No one was fooled. The government press breathed 
double hate against the Serbs, and cried: "Mace- 
donians ! The hour is at hand to free your country 
from the oppressor!" Sixteen thousand Macedonians 
were summoned — sixty thousand responded, and with 
them some fifteen thousand Albanians, and ten thou- 
sand Armenians who had been given asylum from 
Turkish persecution. A grand demonstration was 
arranged with true Bulgarian thoroughness; the new 
volunteers, all slow, exalted faces, and rough, brown 
homespun, surged through the streets cheering and 
singing behind their war-worn flag. They knew that 
they were to head a Bulgarian invasion of Macedonia. 
In twenty speeches delivered from the balcony of 
the Military Club, from the steps of the Sobranie, 
and from the Tsar Liberator monument, they were 
told so. 

Next Sunday, September 6, was the national 
holiday, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the 
union of the Bulgarian kingdom. The printed pro- 
gramme of the parade announced that the Opoltchenie 
and the troops of the garrison of Sofia would participate; 
but on Saturday night a Bulgarian wood merchant 
told me that he had received an order from the govern- 
ment to unload twelve railroad cars full of timber in 
four hours, and turn them over to the government. 
Late in the evening most of the cab horses in the 
city were seized by government quartermasters. That 

325 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

very night the Macedonians mysteriously disappeared; 
and when the parade began in the morning thq gar- 
rison of Sofia — horse, foot, and artillery — had also 
vanished, except for two companies. In the after- 
noon there was a grand patriotic demonstration by 
civilians, punctuated with bellicose speeches; in the 
evening a torchlight procession of students singing 
Macedonian songs. My, how full of politicians and 
journalists was the Grand Cafe de Bulgaria that 
night! But, in spite of the national holiday and the 
critical situation of events, there was no excitement 
whatever. There never is in Sofia — the Bulgars are 
an unemotional people. Even the demonstrations 
were methodical, organized, and directed like flocks 
of sheep. The party chiefs and politicians refused 
to be interviewed — and when that occurs in Bulgaria, 
things are serious indeed. Too late the Opposition 
leaders were scurrying around for support to stop 
the resistless march of events. 

The last act of the coup d'etat was brief and 
dramatic. On Friday, September 18, the Opposition 
leaders, representing six out of the eleven Bulgarian 
parties, had a conference with the King. Tsanov, rep- 
resenting the two Radical parties, Danev the Progres- 
sive Liberals, Stamboliisky the Agrarians, Guechov 
the Nationalists, and Malinov the Democrats, were 
received by his majesty in the presence of his secre- 
tary, Doctor Dobrovitch, and the Crown Prince Boris. 
Malinov, in his speech, said that the military situation 
in Europe and the political situation in the country 

326 



BULGARIA GOES TO WAR 

made it extremely dangerous for Bulgaria to enter the 
war on either side at present. He believed firmly in 
continued neutrality; but if the government thought 
that entrance in the war would help realize the 
national ideals, his constituents desired that it should 
be on the side of the Entente Powers. Stamboliisky 
then presented a memorandum signed by himself and 
his colleagues, which respectfully demanded: 

First. That the government should take no ac- 
tion without calling the Sobranie and consulting the 
wishes of the country. 

Second. That before any action was taken a 
coalition cabinet should be formed (after the model 
of the English and French war governments), with 
an enlarged number of ministers to represent the 
eleven political parties. 

Third. That the Crown should present to the 
government in power the demands of the Opposition, 
with the indorsement of the Crown. 

Guechov took the floor, pointing out by means 
of figures and calculations the inevitable final vic- 
tory of the Entente Powers. "The moment for our 
entrance into the war is unripe," he said. Tsanov 
followed with a speech along the same general lines; 
and after a discussion precising the details of the 
memorandum, the King, Prince Boris, and Doctor 
Dobrovitch withdrew for a private discussion. 

When they returned it became apparent from 
what Doctor Dobrovitch said that the government 
had made up its mind to a course of action, on 

3 2 7 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

the basis of information which could not be made 
public. 

"What most concerns the people of this country," 
burst out Stamboliisky, "must remain a secret then?" 

"I had no idea that you represented the people 
of this country, Mr. Stamboliisky," said the King. 
"Why is it that you have never come to see me be- 
fore?" 

"Because the democratic principles of my party 
forbid it," said Stamboliisky; "but I waive principles 
when the country is in danger. And let me remind 
your Majesty that dynasties which thwart the pop- 
ular will do not last long !" 

"My head is old," replied the King, "and not 
of much value. But you had better take care of your 
own!" 

In vain Malinov and Guechov tried to quiet 
things. By this time Tsanov had lost his temper and 
joined Stamboliisky, and "for a while," said an imag- 
inative observer, "they all kicked each other's shins." 

Finally the King rose and said very sternly: 
"Gentlemen, I shall present your demands to the 
government. I can tell you that we have decided on 
a policy which will be thoroughly carried out at any 
cost. Mr. Stamboliisky, I am happy at last to have 
made your acquaintance!" 

Two days later we left Sofia for Nish, and three 
days after that the Bulgarian mobilization was an- 
nounced. 



328 



SERBIA REVISITED, AND GREECE 

FIFTEEN minutes out from Sofia the train plunges 
again into mounting defiles between ever more 
towering hills, through tunnel after tunnel. Stony 
peaks colored wonderfully in reds and browns and 
subtle grays seem animals crouching, so living is their 
texture. Southward the crinkled Balkans march across 
the sky, blue with distance. It is a breeding-place 
of hard men and fighters. Two hours, and we are 
over the divide, screaming down beside a stream that 
leaps in cascades. A dry, hot, little valley opens out, 
ringed around with arid mountains; there lies Tsari- 
brod, the last Bulgarian station, piled high with heaps 
of army supplies and buzzing with troops. A neat 
little town with substantial houses and public build- 
ings, two factories, good roads running east and north, 
schools, electric lights, and a sewer system. A neat 
little station paved with concrete, where the ticket- 
agent who was so cordial when we stopped there 
four months ago, leans from his window to shake 
hands. The train roars through a tunnel, and twists 
between precipitous hills. Where they open out a 
little, arid and quivering with heat, lies Pirot, the first 
town in Serbia. 

329 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

What a contrast even between these two first 
cousins — Bulgars and Serbs ! The town straggled out, 
an overgrown village, all deep, wide houses roofed 
with Turkish tiles; no school visible. On the dirt 
platform before the ramshackle wooden station, a 
customs officer, the station-master in gold-lace uni- 
form with a sword, a policeman in blue with red 
facings, and a sword, too, and two army officers, were 
having an animated discussion, entirely oblivious of 
the train. The rapid, flexible eloquence of the Ser- 
bian language struck on our ears like a jet of fresh 
water. Around them in easy familiarity crowded 
peasant soldiers in shabby gray uniforms, sandals, and 
the distinctive crushed-in cap of the Serbian army, 
listening and joining in the argument. 

"Mr. Pachitch!" cried the station-master ve- 
hemently: "Mr. Pachitch is no true Serbian! His 
father was a Bulgarian and his mother was a Turk! 
Who couldn't make a better prime minister than any 
Young Radical?" He pounded himself on the chest. 
"Why, I myself " 

The customs officer slapped the major on the 
shoulder, and burst into a shout of laughter. All 
the soldiers laughed, too. Down at the end of the 
station fence, reservists of the last call were coming 
through a gate, one by one, while a sergeant called 
their names on the roster and ticked them off. Old 
men and young boys they were, in every variety of 
improvised uniform, tattered sandals on their feet — 
but all with the military cap and all equipped with 

330 



SERBIA REVISITED, AND GREECE 

new rifles. A boy who could not have been more 
than sixteen, so drunk that he could hardly stagger, 
reeled through with his peasant mother holding him 
upright. The tears streamed down her face; she wiped 
his sweating face with a handkerchief and straightened 
his lapels, and patted him twice on the chest. Growl- 
ing, he made for the sleeping-car. A policeman grabbed 
him by the arm. "Forward !" he yelled; "get forward 
into the box car ! " Without a word the boy threw 
his arms around the policeman and they fell to the 
ground, a waving mass of arms and legs. Everybody 
laughed. An incredibly aged man with one arm came 
hobbling up on a stick and touched a gray-haired 
giant who bore a rifle. He turned and they kissed 
each other on the mouth. Tears ran down the old 
man's face. "Do not let the Bulgars through!" he 
shrilled. . . . 

The customs officer came into our apartment. 
He simply glanced at our passports and never touched 
the baggage. 

"You came from Sofia?" he said eagerly, sitting 
down and offering cigarettes. "What is the news? 
We've been hearing exciting rumors here. Is Bul- 
garia going to war? She'd better not — we'll march 
to Sofia in two days !" 

"But if Austria and Germany attack you?" 

"Pooh, they tried it once! Let them all come! 
Serbia can whip the world! ..." 

Ahead of us, as the train rattled along, rose a 
great chorus from five box cars full of soldiers. They 

33i 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

were singing a new ballad about the Bulgarians, which 
began: 

"King Ferdinand, the Bulgar, got up one day in his palace in 

Sofia and looked out the window, 
And he said to his son, the Crown Prince Boris: 'My son and 

heir, it is a fine day and the Serbian army is very busy, 
So I think if we attack their women and children we may 

not be defeated. . . .' " 

One's first impression on crossing the Greek 
frontier is of a mob of money-changers, bootblacks, 
venders of chocolates and fruit and last week's papers 
— shrewd, brown little traders of harsh, quick speech 
and keen eyes. Three years ago there were no Greeks 
whatever in this arid mountain valley of southern 
Macedonia; now it is all Greek. That is what happens 
in every new Greek country; all but the lowest peas- 
ants tilling the soil are forced out by the most bitter 
economic competition — and even they are working 
for Greeks. The Rumanians are gay and graceful; 
the Bulgars honest and friendly; the Serbs witty, 
brave, and charming; after these the Greeks seem a 
stunted, unfriendly people without any flavor. 

I think I must have asked a hundred Greek sol- 
diers what they thought of the war. Now the salient 
characteristic of Balkan peoples is bitter hatred of 
the nearest aliens. The Greeks hated the Serbians 
normally, but when they spoke of the Bulgars it was 
in terms of torture and burning alive. Venezelos they 
idolized almost to a man; but I found that they would 
even vote against him, for they thought he meant to 

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THE SERB. 



SERBIA REVISITED, AND GREECE 

force them into war — and the Greeks did not want to 
fight. But Greeks are very sentimental; you only have 
to wave a flag and shout "glory" to them, and they 
will go to war for a good cause or a bad one. Greek 
ambitions are limitless. They consider themselves the 
heirs of Periclean Athens, of the Byzantine Empire, 
the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the far-flung 
colonies of the ancient Greek city-states. An editorial 
paragraph from a Greek newspaper displays their 
ordinary frame of mind: 

"Greece, which has a history five thousand years 
old, and is the mother of Western civilization, should 
not let itself be surpassed by nations who have managed 
to assemble their children under their hegemony, as 
Piedmont dominated Italy, as Prussia dominated 
Germany. The Hellenic nation should not show it- 
self incompetent, powerless, and inferior to certain 
new states, such as Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and 
Turkey, which are so many mosaics constituted in 
Europe by barbarians coming from Central Asia." 

And this in face of the fact that the new Greek 
provinces are inefficiently and corruptly governed, 
and that Athens itself is a hotbed of lies and bribery. 
A typical example is the Greek railroad official who 
was bribed by Germans to hinder the mobilization 
of the Greek army. And remember, that the first 
time the casus federis of the Greco-Serbian treaty was 
ever invoked Greece refused to fulfil her obligations. . . . 

The last day I was at Salonika a great cloud of 
black smoke appeared at the foot of the gulf; a little 

333 



THE WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 

destroyer steamed full speed for the city and anchored 
off the quai. Three boats were landed, containing 
English officers in campaign uniform, with the red 
tabs that mark Staff officials, twenty-five boxes and 
trunks, and a couple of British marines carrying 
rifles with fixed bayonets. The baggage was piled 
in the street and the officers went into the Hotel de 
Rome. In fifteen minutes the rumor was all over the 
town that Sir Ian Hamilton was in Salonika. Wild 
excitement seized the Greek officials. Around the 
two sentries guarding the baggage prowled a solemn, 
uneasy circle of policemen; a dense mass of towns- 
people stood silently watching. Hot wires clamored 
the news to Athens; frightened officials cried: "What^ 
does it mean? What shall we do?" 

In the meantime we had run into the King of 
England's Messenger on his way home through Italy 
with despatches from the Balkans. He was pretty 
reasonably mellow with much Scotch and soda, as 
we went to lunch in the Hotel de Rome. 

Five tables away from us sat the general him- 
self — a tall, bronzed, solid Englishman with a gray 
mustache — and all his Staff. He and the King's 
Messenger bowed to one another. A few minutes 
afterward a waiter came to our table. 

"General Hamilton would like to speak with the 
King's Messenger." Our friend rose, reefing slightly, 
and went over. Pretty soon he came back, holding on 
to chairs and piloting himself with difficulty. He sat 
down at the table and grinned. 

334 



SERBIA REVISITED, AND GREECE 

"It is too, too funny," he said weakly. "The 
old duffer wants me to go immediately to Athens and 
ask the British ambassador for instructions. 

" 'Damme,' he said to me, 'what the devil have 
they sent us here for ? Here I am — and not a word of 
instructions. What the devil do they want me to 
do?'" 

That night we took ship for the Piraeus and 
home. Next morning, steaming down between far 
islands that lay like clouds on the sea, we met twelve 
transports full of British troops on their way to Salon- 
ika. 



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